Magnetic Tape Proves Its Value In The AI Storage Era

Magnetic tape is experiencing a resurgence in 2025 as AI-driven data growth, cyber security pressures and new material innovations push organisations back towards a technology first introduced more than seventy years ago.

What Magnetic Tape Is And How It Works

Magnetic tape stores data on a long, narrow strip of plastic film coated with a magnetic layer. The tape is wound inside a cartridge and passed across a read and write head inside the drive. Since the tape must move sequentially, it is not designed for fast, random access in the way a hard disk or SSD is. It is instead designed for efficient, bulk writing and long-term storage.

Tape libraries, used by larger organisations, combine hundreds or thousands of cartridges in robotic cabinets that load tapes automatically. These libraries act as vast, energy-efficient archives for data that needs to be kept but not constantly accessed. Typical use cases include regulatory records, scientific and medical datasets, media archives, analytics data, CCTV footage and full system backups. Tape has been used for these roles since the 1950s and, despite the emergence of disks, flash and cloud storage, it has never disappeared from enterprise environments.

Why Tape Remains In Everyday Workloads

Several characteristics have kept tape relevant. For example, it offers the lowest cost per terabyte of any mainstream storage medium, making it attractive for multi-petabyte archives. Also, cartridges can remain readable for decades when stored correctly, making them suitable for compliance regimes and research datasets that must be preserved far beyond the lifespan of typical disk systems.

Tape also has exceptionally low error rates. For example, modern Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology uses powerful error-correction algorithms that protect data as it is written. LTO has been the dominant open tape standard since the late 1990s, evolving through successive generations with higher capacities, stronger encryption and support for features such as write-once, read-many modes.

Alternatives

The main alternatives for large-scale storage are traditional disks, flash arrays and cloud archives. Disks and SSDs provide fast access for operational workloads, while cloud storage offers virtually limitless scale without on-premises hardware. However, cost becomes a challenge once organisations begin keeping years of unstructured data. Tape avoids ongoing energy costs, avoids data-egress fees, and consumes no power when cartridges sit idle in a library.

Why Tape Is Back In Demand

It seems that demand for tape is currently being driven by the rapid rise of unstructured data. For example, organisations now produce and collect logs, video, images, sensor feeds and documents at a scale that was unusual a decade ago. The emergence of generative AI has turned this unstructured data into a strategic resource. Many enterprises now view their archives as training material for future AI models or as datasets that can be mined for insights.

Record

In 2023, the LTO consortium reported that 152.9 exabytes of compressed tape capacity were shipped worldwide, a record at the time. Shipment volumes broke that record again in mid-2024 with 176.5 exabytes shipped. In fact, this was the fourth consecutive year of growth. Vendors attribute this momentum to AI, compliance requirements and the rising cost of keeping large datasets online.

Economically Viable Medium

Analysts continue to describe tape as the only economically viable medium for archives that will grow into the multi-petabyte range. The LTO consortium, the group that develops and oversees the LTO tape standard, has previously highlighted potential total cost of ownership reductions of up to 86 per cent when compared with equivalent disk-based solutions across a ten-year period, with substantial savings also reported when compared with cloud archives over the same timeframe.

The New 40 TB LTO-10 Cartridge

One of the most significant developments in the tape market this year is the release of the new 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge specification. This represents a major capacity boost over the existing 30 TB LTO-10 cartridges, and crucially, the increase does not require new tape drives.

The capacity uplift is enabled by a new base film material known as Aramid. This material allows manufacturers to produce thinner and smoother tape, enabling a longer tape length within the same cartridge housing. The result is an additional 10 TB of native capacity, offering organisations a way to store larger datasets without expanding their library footprint.

HPE’s Stephen Bacon described the new cartridge as a response to AI-scale storage demands, noting that “AI has turned archives into strategic assets” and highlighting the role of tape in consolidating petabytes, improving cyber resilience through offline air-gapping and keeping long-term retention affordable.

Organisations will soon be able to choose between 30 TB and 40 TB LTO-10 media depending on their cost and density needs, giving enterprise teams more flexibility in how they scale.

How Tape Supports AI-Scale Archives

AI workloads require very large training datasets, often consisting of structured and unstructured data accumulated over many years. While a small proportion of this data must be kept on fast disk or cloud storage for active use, much of it can sit on a colder, cheaper tier until it is needed again. Tape seems to fill this role effectively.

When a dataset is required for training a new model or running a new analysis, organisations can restore only the relevant portion to a disk-based environment. This keeps primary systems fast while allowing the business to retain historic data without excessive cost. Examples include:

– Media companies storing decades of raw video footage for future AI processing.

– Healthcare providers archiving medical imagery for research or diagnostics.

– Research institutions holding large scientific datasets that may later be used to train AI models.

– Financial firms retaining historical transactions that can be analysed for fraud models.

Tape and Sustainability

The sustainability angle is also relevant here. For example, tape consumes no energy when cartridges are idle, which is increasingly important as data retention requirements grow faster than most organisations’ environmental budgets.

Why Cyber Security Is Driving Tape’s Revival

Ransomware has fundamentally changed the way enterprises think about backup. For example, when attackers can encrypt or delete connected storage, offline copies become critical. Tape provides a kind of physical air gap, as a tape cartridge removed from a library cannot be reached across the network.

Many organisations now follow the 3-2-1 or 3-2-1-1 backup strategy, which requires one offline copy stored on a different medium. Tape remains the simplest and most established way to achieve this. It is also highly portable, meaning offline copies can be stored off-site, which provides protection against physical disasters.

Some organisations also use write-once, read-many tape media for critical records, preventing accidental or malicious changes and strengthening their overall cyber resilience.

The Roadmap Ahead

The LTO consortium recently updated its roadmap and confirmed plans for LTO-11 through to LTO-14. Native capacities will continue to rise, with the roadmap peaking at a projected 913 TB for LTO-14. The revised roadmap places more emphasis on achievable density gains, reliability and cost efficiency, aligning future products with enterprise demand for high-capacity, long-lived archives suited to AI and analytics workloads.

The roadmap also seeks to ensure that tape libraries can continue scaling into the exabyte range, giving organisations confidence that their archive strategy will remain technically and economically viable over the next decade.

Challenges, Objections And Criticisms

Perhaps not surprisingly, tape does still face some criticism. The biggest concern is access speed. For example, because tape is sequential, retrieving a specific file can be pretty slow, especially when the data is buried deep within a long cartridge. This is why tape is rarely used for operational workloads where rapid, repeated access is required.

There is also the practical side to consider. For example, tape libraries require careful handling, environmental controls and periodic testing. Skills are another issue. Many younger IT teams have grown up working only with cloud and flash systems, leaving fewer staff familiar with tape management. Migrating data between LTO generations can be time-consuming, and organisations must plan for these cycles to avoid being left with unsupported formats.

Also, some businesses prefer cloud archives because they offer global access, integration with cloud analytics tools and managed durability. Others simply feel tape requires more up-front investment than cloud subscriptions or deep-archive tiers. Perception also plays a part. Tape is sometimes viewed as outdated, even when the economics point strongly in its favour.

Even so, most analysts note that modern storage strategies are multi-tiered. Tape does not replace disk, flash or cloud, it complements them. Its role is to keep very large datasets safe, affordable and durable while faster environments deal with day-to-day workloads. As organisations continue to accumulate huge troves of data for AI and analytics, that role appears to be becoming more important, not less.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Tape’s renewed momentum shows that long-term storage decisions are changing as organisations weigh cost, risk and the growing importance of historical data. AI is accelerating that shift because archives that were once seen as routine compliance obligations are now being treated as potential training material and sources of future insight. This gives tape a clearer strategic role than it has had for many years. It offers a stable way to retain data at scale without placing pressure on budgets or energy targets, and it helps organisations withstand ransomware incidents by providing offline copies that cannot be tampered with remotely.

UK businesses in particular may find that tape fits naturally into multi-tier storage plans. Many rely heavily on cloud platforms for operational workloads, but long-term retention remains expensive when kept online. Tape provides a way to control those costs while meeting regulatory expectations around record keeping and resilience. It also offers a reliable route to building deeper AI datasets without needing to expand cloud storage indefinitely. These practical benefits explain why more IT teams are revisiting tape not as legacy infrastructure but as an essential pressure valve for growing digital estates.

Vendors and analysts expect this direction to continue as the roadmap evolves and capacities rise. However, the challenges identified in the article remain relevant. For example, access speed is still a limitation and operational expertise is still required, especially where organisations run large libraries across multiple generations. Misconceptions about tape’s relevance also persist, even as the technology improves. The reality is that these barriers tend to matter less once businesses focus on what tape is designed to do rather than what it is not. Long-term archives do not depend on millisecond retrieval, they depend on affordability, longevity and resilience, which are exactly the traits tape continues to offer.

Stakeholders across the wider ecosystem are responding to the same pressures. For example, cloud providers are investing in colder, slower archive tiers, compliance teams are tightening retention requirements, and security teams are prioritising offline backups. All of these shifts align with tape’s strengths. As AI models become larger and more data hungry, and as cyber threats continue to evolve, it seems likely that tape will remain a practical part of the storage mix for many years, especially for organisations that need to store vast volumes of information safely, predictably and at a manageable cost.