And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update

176.5 Exabytes of the stuff shipped in 2024, another double-digit jump

Shipments of tape storage media increased again in 2024, according to HPE, IBM, and Quantum – the three companies that back the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format.

The three companies on Tuesday claimed they shipped 176.5 Exabytes worth of tape during 2024, a 15.4 percent increase on 2023’s 152.9 Exabytes.

For those of you who stopped paying attention to tape a while back and need a refresher, LTO is an open tape format co-developed by the aforementioned companies, who all produce drives that can read and write the tapes. Sony and Fujifilm make LTO tapes.

LTO tapes ship in cartridge that are always the same size. Every few years the LTO consortium announce a next-generation spec. 6th-gen LTO had 2.5TB native capacity, 7th-gen 6TB, and gen-8 hit 12TB capacity.

Since gen-7, LTO drives can read and write only the previous generation of tape.

LTO 10 debuts this year, and promises 36TB per tape. The org’s roadmap extends to LTO 14, which it predicts will pack 576TB on each tape. If the LTO team sticks to its usual four-yearly release cadence, LTO 14 will arrive around 2040.

At which point tape still won’t be dead.

Tape enthusiasts point to its low cost per terabyte, and ability to retain data while offline and unpowered as among its virtues, and reasons it remains relevant despite its slow data transfer speeds and hard disk capacity reaching 30TB.

In canned quotes provided by LTO, Quantum’s general manager for secondary storage Bruno Hald said those qualities remain relevant as organizations assemble the vast collections of data needed to power AI applications.

“Organisations navigating their way through the AI/ML era need to reconfigure their storage architectures to keep up, and LTO tape technology is an essential piece of the puzzle,” he said.

Analyst firm IDC’s research veep for infrastructure software platforms Phil Goodwin offered similar sentiments.

“Continued growth in LTO tape shipments shows the important role that tape plays in modern data architectures, especially as companies deal with rapidly growing amounts of data,” he said. “In fact, tape's unique combination of scalability, cost-efficiency, and cyber resilience makes it a valuable component for enterprises seeking secure, sustainable long-term data storage.”

The Register will therefore likely be back with another annual “Tape is still not dead” update for years to come. ®