Tape isn’t dead! While everyone’s out there singing the praises of cloud storage and trying not to choke on their monthly invoices, tape just keeps doing its thing: Reliable, Affordable, and Built for the long haul. Now we’ve got LTO 10, which is a huge upgrade.
Roadmap: 36 TB Raw Capacity
The roadmap states that LTO 10 will double the raw capacity of LTO 9. If you’re dealing with 4K or 8K RAW footage or just have a mountain of footage that needs to be stored safely and long-term, that’s a big advancement. Fewer cartridges to manage. Less rack space and less shuffling around in the archive room. You will often see larger capacities being discussed, but that’s compressed, which is fine for CRMs or transactional data, but we can’t compress media. So we always work on the raw capacity. You will notice in the image below how it shows two sizes for LTO 10: compressed and raw. We are hearing that the LTO may be capped at 30TB at 400MB/s transfer speed. It’s early days, but we shall see how it pans out.
EditShare ARK and LTO 10 A Perfect Match
Here’s the good news: EditShare ARK will support LTO 10. If you already use ARK for your archive workflows, this is a free upgrade to your sanity. You’ll get double the storage per tape. There’s no need to change how your team works. Everything just runs like it always has, except now your shelves fill up a whole lot slower. That means you’re ready for whatever next-gen content you’re producing, whether that’s episodic 8K delivery remastering old content in HDR or just trying not to get buried in files.
Compatibility
Let’s talk about the one weird anomaly. IBM’s datasheet for LTO 10 only says, “IBM LTO 10-tape drive can read and write to LTO Ultrium 10 cartridges.” They don’t mention backward compatibility at all. There is no promise that LTO 10 drives will read LTO 9 or anything older. That’s a break from how LTO has worked for years, where each new gen could usually read two generations back. If you’ve got a mountain of older tapes, you’ll either need to keep older drives around or run a migration strategy. But honestly, that’s just part of managing any archive.
LTO Still Makes Sense for Media Teams
Storage needs in media and entertainment are not shrinking. 8K VFX dailies, every project is bigger than the last. So when you get a format that gives you 36 TB per tape and runs for decades without a subscription attached, that’s worth paying attention to. Tape is a cost-effective long-term archival medium, complemented by our large. Adding EditShare ARK, which compliments FLOW asset management, means every asset that gets archived and FLOW knows its location. It keeps a proxy of that archived file always online, meaning you get a representation of that high-resolution file immediately. Its streamlined initiative and most important, fast.
Final Word
Is LTO 10 perfect? Not quite. The missing backward compatibility might be a pain. But if you’re starting fresh, building new archives, or just want to stop adding shelves every quarter, LTO 10 is the biggest leap we’ve had in years.
