New 30TB tape is a welcome hold-my-beer moment for Petabyte-scale storage as Seagate and Western Digital smash HDD capacity barrier

• 10th generation LTO is finally here, four years after 9th gen launched
• It will have a 30TB capacity, far less than the 48TB originally planned
• LTO roadmap runs to 576TB which may not appear until 2040 at the current rate

If you want to back up tens of petabytes of data or even more, here’s some good news for you. Without much fanfare, IBM, Symply and Spectra Logic have separately made LTO-10 announcements in the past 48 hours.