Don’t rock the boat: tape drive shipments to grow significantly in first quarter of 2026

Tape-based drives are still in demand. In the first quarter of 2026, tape drive media shipments increased 57% compared with the same period last year. The development of the LTO-9 recording standard and the introduction of LTO-10 played an important role in this growth. Ironically, for long-term data storage, tape remains unmatched in terms of cost, energy efficiency and network resiliency.

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Last year, tape drive manufacturers shipped 160 exabytes of product (10¹⁸ bytes), shipments are down 9% from the record year of 2024, when LTO (Linear Tape Open) memory shipments reached an impressive 176.5 exabytes. However, according to a spokesperson for the LTO program, “Except for 2024, memory shipments are higher than any year in history.”. The latest data also confirms this.

While tape drives may seem obsolete by the mid-2020s, storage technology providers HPE, IBM, and Quantum yesterday reported a 57% year-over-year increase in LTO storage shipments in the first quarter of 2026. Data center demands, along with the need for traditional archiving tools and reliable backup, are driving record tape drive shipments.

“We are seeing unprecedented growth in data volume, and at the same time, the industry is facing increasing pressures on cost, energy consumption and network security.“, said Hugues Meyrath, CEO of Quantum. – As organizations adapt to this new reality, tape drives are increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, providing predictable economics and reliable long-term data storage. “.

Another growth factor is the market’s willingness to use the LTO-9 and LTO-10 tape recording standards. Tape drive manufacturers still position the former as a very beneficial upgrade over older generation drives. According to the development company, LTO-9 tape supports up to 18 TB of uncompressed data or 45 TB of compressed data. The latest generation of LTO-10 tape cartridges can store up to 40 TB of raw data or up to 100 TB of compressed data.

Tape storage system manufacturers claim that the promising LTO-14 standard should provide storage of up to 576 TB of uncompressed data and up to 1,440 TB of compressed data on a single cartridge. But today, tape drives offer the lowest cost per terabyte of storage, superior network resiliency, and high energy efficiency.