The staying power of tape storage in the AI era (www.techradar.com)

As AI workloads balloon in size and regulatory scrutiny tightens, enterprises are rediscovering tape as a strategic layer in modern storage stacks. The article positions Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology—now at LTO-10—as an economical, durable, and secure medium for exabyte-scale, long-term retention that complements flash and disk. Tape is framed not as “legacy” but as a purpose-built solution for cold data: training corpora for LLMs, long-running scientific sensor streams, and immutable archives needed for auditability under emerging rules like the EU AI Act. Key technical points underscore why tape fits AI-era demands: LTO-10 cartridges hold up to 30 TB native (≈75 TB compressed) with a roadmap projecting multi-petabyte compressed cartridges in future generations; modern drives sustain transfer rates up to ~1,200 MB/s (compressed) over a new 32 GB interface; and innovations span new electronics, heads, mechanics, firmware and software. Tape also delivers low power consumption, air-gapped security options, built-in encryption, and a far lower total cost of ownership versus all-flash or cloud-only archives—avoiding egress fees and vendor lock. For AI/ML teams, tape offers scalable, sustainable cold storage that preserves provenance, enables lifecycle policies and auditability, and hardens defenses against ransomware—making it a pragmatic foundation for data-hungry, compliance-driven AI projects.