In 2026 is there demand for 7X more manufactured storage annually and is there sufficient value for this storage to spend $122B more annually (2.4X) for this storage? Unlike HDD, tape magnetic physics is not the limiting issues since tape bit cells are 60X larger than HDD bit cells … The projected tape areal density in 2025 (90 Gbit/in2) is 13x smaller than today’s HDD areal density and has already been demonstrated in laboratory environments.
IBM is the last of the hardware manufacturers: IBM is the only builder of LTO8 IBM is the only vendor left with enterprise class tape drives If you only have one manufacturer how do you mitigate risk? These cloud archival solutions all use tape: Amazon AWS Glacier and Glacier Deep ($1/TB/month) Azure General Purpose v2 storage Archive ($2/TB/month)
Google GCP Coldline($7/TB/month) If it’s all the same tape, how do we mitigate risk?
Source: dshr.org