LTO Program for Next Generations

The LTO Program is controlled by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Quantum. According to the latest roadmap that includes ninth and tenth generation of LTO Ultrium technology, the LTO tape will be capable to store 48 TB native data in a single tape cartridge with data transfer rates of up to 1100 MB/second.

The current generation of LTO technology – LTO-6 – supports up to 2.5 TB native and 6.25 TB compressed data storage capacity per tape cartridge and tape drive data transfer rates of up to 400MB per second for over 1.4 terabytes of storage performance an hour per drive.

The next four generations of LTO program are listed below:

LTO-7: 6.25 TB native capacity, native data transfer rates of up to 315 Mbps and compressed capacity/throughput of 16 TB and 750 Mbps.

LTO-8: 12.8 TB native capacity, native data transfer rates of up to 472 Mbps and compressed capacity/throughput of 32 TB and 1180 Mbps.

LTO-9: 26 TB native capacity, native data transfer rates of up to 708 Mbps and compressed capacity/throughput of 62.5 TB and 1770 Mbps.

LTO-10: 48 TB native capacity, native data transfer rates of up to 1100 Mbps and compressed capacity/throughput of 120 TB and 2750 Mbps.

Each latest generation of LTO tape drive will include full backward compatibility with the previous generation with the ability to read tapes of previous two generations.

The estimated release dates of next generations of LTO program are given below:

* The release dates of LTO-8, LTO-9 and LTO-10 are estimated.

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