The Storage Format That Costs $5 Per Terabyte-But Requires A $10,000 Drive
How-To Geek, Thursday, April 9th, 2026
The challenge of keeping data safe and accessible will probably never truly end. It seems that every medium has some major caveats when it comes to cold storage, but if you spend some time researching the problem, one format keeps coming up: tape.
This might sound weird given that the tape media we know, like cassettes or VHS, are pretty fragile and prone to degrading, but if we're talking about Linear Tape-Open (LTO) you're looking at a (ideal) lifespan up to 30 years, and a cost per terabyte that's significantly cheaper than SSDs or hard drives. So why isn't everyone on the LTO train?