The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) organisation has signed off on efforts by Fujifilm and Sony to create tapes that conform with the LTO-9 standard – meaning that new-generation tapes with 45 terabytes of capacity are now on sale.

Fujifilm bolted out of the gates with an [1]announcement to the effect that it sells media that support LTO-9's spec of 18TB native capacity, or 45TB after data is compressed.

Previous generations of LTO have improved capacity by 100 per cent compared to their predecessors. LTO-9 instead adds fifty per cent capacity compared to 2017's LTO-8. The companies behind LTO – HPE, IBM, and Quantum – never quite explained why the jump was smaller this time around.

[2]

They did suggest that LTO-9 would meet a new need for tape – an air-gapped archive that's untouchable by ransomware.

[3]Another big year for tape as ... oops. 2020 sales dropped 8% thanks to 'global shutdowns'

[4]Seagate claims it shipped its third zettabyte of storage in record time

[5]Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

One reason for the smaller leap might be that LTO-9's transfer speeds grew at nowhere near 50 per cent – jumping from LTO-8's 750MB/sec for compressed data and 360MB/sec native to 1000MB/sec and 440MB/sec respectively.

At those speeds – 3.6TB/hour – recovering from ransomware on a 24TB tape might not be quite the ransomware recovery revolution the LTO group would have us believe.

[6]

[7]

Whatever the reasoning behind the spec of this generation of LTO, its backers are enthusiastic about it.

HPE has announced it is shipping LTO-9 tape. Quantum [8]announced LTO-9 drives.

Today, HPE is launching LTO-9 Ultrium data cartridges! With over 107 million HPE cartridges already shipped, the new HPE LTO-9 RW and WORM tapes are capable of holding up to 18 TB of native or 45 TB of compressed data (2.5:1) [9]#everyoneneedstape [10]#lto9 [11]#bigdata [12]pic.twitter.com/nHy7ybkVE0 — Andrew Dodd (@tapevine) [13]September 7, 2021

IBM [14]announced that its Spectrum Archive storage software and tape libraries can read LTO-9 cartridges (thanks to the fact that each LTO generation is backwards-compatible).

New LTO tech debuts about every three years, but this generation took four years to emerge. So LTO-9's arrival is a big day for some people – not quite the return of ABBA, but still hotly anticipated. If your storage admin behaves a little unusually today, this may be the reason! ®

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[1] https://www.fujifilm.com/us/en/news/LTO-9

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YTiJ6pCeJW0mXzoPBVH9-QAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/19/lto_tape_sales_drop/

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/07/seagate_three_zettabytes/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/26/pc_boot_record/

[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YTiJ6pCeJW0mXzoPBVH9-QAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YTiJ6pCeJW0mXzoPBVH9-QAAAEo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[8] https://blog.quantum.com/2021/09/07/announcing-availability-of-lto-9-tape-drives-in-enterprise-and-midrange-tape-systems/

[9] https://twitter.com/hashtag/everyoneneedstape?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[10] https://twitter.com/hashtag/lto9?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[11] https://twitter.com/hashtag/bigdata?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[12] https://t.co/nHy7ybkVE0

[13] https://twitter.com/tapevine/status/1435198314899820544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[14] https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/6/872/ENUSAP21-0306/index.html

[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/