By Phil Wandrei, Sr Product Marketing Manager
We at Spectra Logic are pleased to introduce the next great tape innovation — the 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge, delivering a 33% jump in capacity over the 30 TB cartridge announced earlier this year.
This breakthrough cartridge will soon be fully supported in all Spectra libraries equipped with LTO-10 drives, including the Spectra® TFinity®, T950, Spectra Cube™, and Spectra Stack. The addition of 40 TB media enables customers to achieve higher density and efficiency while maximizing existing infrastructure investments — advancing the scalability and longevity of modern data preservation.
A New Milestone for Long-Term Storage
Accelerating data growth and redefined retention requirements, particularly driven by AI, are challenging IT professionals to preserve and protect massive datasets in perpetuity. Tape technology is rapidly advancing and remains the only viable and sustainable solution for cold data storage at scale.
Spectra Logic stands alone as the industry’s exascale expert, with more than four decades of empowering the world’s most demanding enterprises, research institutions, and government agencies to build affordable, scalable, and secure archives. Additionally, Spectra has made tape technology simpler, more compatible, and more accessible by pioneering object-based tape and Tape-as-a-Service (TaaS) — powerful tools in safeguarding vast repositories of unstructured data in hybrid- or sovereign-cloud environments.
With 40 TB LTO-10 media, the industry takes another leap forward — extending tape’s unmatched value in long-term data protection and cyber-resilience while Spectra reaffirms its leadership in archive density, sustainability, and affordability.
Technical Advancements: More Capacity & Proven Reliability
The new 40 TB cartridge is compatible with all LTO-10 drives — allowing IT teams to quickly scale data density, reduce media handling, and optimize operational efficiency. Regardless of cartridge capacity, the sustained throughput capability of all LTO-10 drives will remain at 400 MB/s, which is about 50% faster than the latest 30 TB hard drives.
Spectra offers its customers an extra layer of assurance with its full line of Spectra Certified Media, backed by a lifetime guarantee and delivered ready for peak performance. Every cartridge is cleaned, tested, and verified in the Spectra Logic media assurance lab to pass the highest quality standards before use.
Combined with Spectra LumOS library management software and its integrated Media Lifecycle Management, Spectra systems track more than 40 health metrics, offering proactive insight into performance and longevity for every cartridge. The result is consistent read/write reliability, maximum performance, and confidence for critical archives.
Financial Benefits: Maximizing ROI & Reducing Operational Costs
The increased capacity of 40 TB LTO-10 media directly translates into lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for offline storage, strengthening tape’s efficiency and sustainability advantage over HDD arrays and archival cloud storage.
Operational overhead — including power, cooling, and maintenance — drops proportionally as fewer cartridges and drives are required. This gives IT organizations more control over their long-term data strategy and enables enterprises to consolidate archives on-premises, meeting compliance and data sovereignty requirements while avoiding the wildly inflated and unpredictable costs of public cloud archive.
Continuing Leadership in Enterprise Archive
With the introduction of the 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge across its library portfolio, Spectra Logic reaffirms its commitment to advancing enterprise-grade tape solutions that balance scalability, security, and sustainability. This milestone reinforces Spectra’s leadership in delivering storage built for the next era of data growth.
