{"id":90962,"date":"2019-06-11T07:00:59","date_gmt":"2019-06-11T14:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=90962"},"modified":"2025-12-12T12:59:32","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T20:59:32","slug":"how-to-survive-the-lto-8-tape-shortage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/how-to-survive-the-lto-8-tape-shortage\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of Stock: How to Survive the LTO-8 Tape Shortage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LTO-8<\/a><\/p>\n

Eighteen months ago, the few remaining LTO tape drive manufacturers announced the availability of LTO-8, the latest generation of the Linear Tape-Open storage technology. Yet today, almost no one is actually writing data to LTO-8 tapes. It\u2019s not that people aren\u2019t interested in upgrading to the denser LTO-8 format that offers 12 TB per cartridge, twice LTO-7\u2019s six TB capacity. It\u2019s simply that the two remaining LTO tape manufacturers are locked in a patent infringement battle. And that means LTO-8 tapes are off the market indefinitely.<\/p>\n

The pain of this delay is most acute for media professionals who are always quick to adopt higher capacity storage media for video and audio files that are notorious storage hogs. As cameras get more sophisticated, capturing in higher resolutions and higher frame rates, the storage capacity required per hour of content shoots through the roof. For example, one hour of ProRes UltraHD requires 148.72 GB storage capacity, which is four times more than the 37.35 GB required for one hour of ProRes HD-1080. Meanwhile, falling camera prices are encouraging production teams to use more cameras per shoot, further increasing the capacity requirements.<\/p>\n

Since its founding, the LTO Consortium has prepared for storage growth by setting a goal of doubling tape density with each LTO generation and committed to releasing a new generation every two to three years. While this lofty goal might seem admirable to the LTO Consortium, it puts customers with earlier generations of LTO systems in a difficult position. New generation LTO drives at best can only read tapes from the two previous generations. So once a new generation is announced, the clock begins ticking on data stored on deprecated generations of tapes. Until you migrate the data to a newer generation, you\u2019re stuck maintaining older tape drive hardware that may be no longer supported by manufacturers.<\/p>\n

How Manufacturer Lawsuits Led to the LTO-8 Shortage<\/h2>\n

How the industry and the market arrived in this painful place is a tangled tale. The lawsuit and counter-lawsuit that led to the LTO-8 shortage is a patent infringement dispute between Fuji and Sony, the only two remaining manufacturers of LTO tape media. The timeline is complicated, starting in 2016 with Fujifilm suing Sony, then Sony counter-suing Fuji. By March 2019, US import bans of LTO products of both manufacturers were in place.<\/p>\n

In the middle of these legal battles, LTO-8 drive<\/em> manufacturers announced product availability in late 2017. But what about the LTO-8 tapes? Fujifilm says they\u2019re not currently manufacturing LTO-8 and have never sold them. And Sony says its US imports of LTO-8 have been stopped and won\u2019t comment about when they will begin shipping again per the dispute. So no LTO-8 for you!<\/p>\n

\"All<\/a>
All LTO-8 tapes for sale at tapeandmedia.com are marked out-of-stock on June 8, 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note that having only two LTO tape manufacturers is a root cause of this shortage. If there were still six LTO tape manufacturers like there were when LTO was launched in 2000, a dispute between two vendors might not have left the market in the lurch.<\/p>\n

Weighing Your Options — LTO-8 Shortage Survival Strategies<\/h2>\n

If you\u2019re currently using LTO for backup or archive, you have a few options for weathering the LTO-8 shortage.<\/p>\n

The first option is to keep using your current LTO generation and wait until the disputes settle out completely before upgrading to LTO-8. The downside here is you\u2019ll have to buy more and more LTO-7 or LTO-6 tapes that don\u2019t offer the capacity you probably need if you\u2019re storing higher resolution video or other capacity-hogging formats. And while you\u2019ll be spending more on tapes than if you were able to use the higher capacity newer generation tapes, you\u2019ll also know that anything you write to old-gen LTO tapes will have to be migrated sooner than planned. LTO\u2019s short two to three year generation cycle doesn\u2019t leave time for legal battles, and remember, manufacturers guarantee at most two generations of backward compatibility.<\/p>\n

A second option is to go ahead and buy an LTO-8 library and use LTO-7 tapes that have been specially formatted for higher capacity called LTO Type M (M8)<\/a>. When initialized as Type M media, LTO-7 can hold nine TB of data instead of the standard six TB LTO-7 cartridge initialized as Type A. That puts it halfway up to the 12 TB capacity of an LTO-8 tape. However, this extra capacity comes with several caveats:<\/p>\n