LTO8, LTO Ultrium 8 Data Cartridges
The LTO8 tape has a capacity of up to 12TB native and up to 30TB compressed. The LTO8 tapes have started production again and will be available again in September 2019 in Australia! This was due to legal battles between the two major tape manufacturers.
Click to see the Bloomberg text and audio article on this issue.
Click to see the latest update with production starting again.
LTO8 tape library owners will have to use the tape called the Type 'M' or M8 tape. Everyone else will need to get preformatted LTO7 M8 tapes or use LTO7 tapes. The 'M' tape is created by providing a NEW LTO7 tape that can be formatted in most, nearly all LTO Ultrium 8 tape library drives, but must have a special tape barcode label applied and ensure the latest firmware is loaded for the drives in the library, and the library itself to do this! Always check with the manufacturer of your LTO8 library as some models have this feature before others. The LTO8 'M' tape will have a capacity of up to 9TB native and up to 22.5TB compressed. This will be the best value per TB for your new LTO8 drives but the LTO8 tape itself will be the highest capacity. Both the LTO8 M8 tape and the LTO8 tape itself have the same speed for read and write. The new LTO8 stand-alone drives will be able to read and write to LTO7 tapes, the pre-formatted LTO8 'M' tapes (unless you use a Quantum stand-alone drive) and the new LTO8 tapes. Please note that LTO8 drives will not be able to read or write to LTO6 tapes which is the first time ever an LTO drive cannot read back two generations!
