Fujifilm announced an investment of approximately 10 billion yen to expand its factory in Odawara.
The Japanese company aims to increase magnetic tape manufacturing capacity to five times the usable capacity of 2025 between the years 2026 and 2028. This expansion focuses primarily on the newest generation of LTO Ultrium 10 tapes.
According to Fujifilm, this marks its largest investment yet in production equipment specifically designed for this type of data medium. While everyday users moved to external disks, network storage, and clouds, large data centers still rely on magnetic tape.
Growing Demand for Data Archives
The need to store massive volumes of information long-term drives this renewed demand. Data accumulates during cloud service operations, scientific research, film production, and the training of artificial intelligence models.
Organizations do not need constant access to all of this generated data. Some files see use only once every few months or years, yet companies must keep them for potential future processing.
Magnetic tapes excel in this area by offering high capacity at relatively low costs per stored terabyte. They consume no electrical energy during long-term storage.
Record Volumes in Tape Shipments
Numbers from the LTO Program organization, backed by HPE, IBM, and Quantum, confirm this increased interest. Manufacturers shipped tape media with a total declared capacity of 177 exabytes in 2024, setting a historical record.
A 9 percent drop followed in 2025 down to 160 exabytes, which still represented the second-best result in the format’s history. Shipped capacity grew 57 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of this year.
Buyers must distinguish between the number of sold cassettes and their total capacity. Newer generations store more information on a single tape, meaning growth in shipped capacity does not automatically match the percentage growth of sold media units.
Capacity and Speed of LTO-10 Tapes
The current LTO-10 generation stores 30 or 40 TB of uncompressed data on a single cassette, depending on the specific variant. Manufacturers report capacities up to 75 or 100 TB when applying an assumed compression ratio of 2.5 to 1.
These higher figures do not serve as universally usable capacity. JPEG photographs, compressed videos, or pre-packed archives usually undergo no further significant compression, requiring reliance on the native capacity of 30 or 40 TB.
LTO-10 drives reach uncompressed sequential transfer speeds of up to 400 MB per second. Their primary weakness remains file access speed, because tape drives must physically locate files by rewinding, which can take tens of seconds or longer.
Offline Tapes Protect Against Ransomware and Reduce Costs
Physical disconnection from computer networks provides a major advantage against ransomware attacks. Attackers often target backups to prevent victims from restoring systems without paying a ransom, but operators can remove tapes from drives and store them offline.
Magnetic tapes also require no electricity once placed on a shelf, unlike continuously powered and cooled disk arrays. This difference in operational costs becomes significant for archives holding thousands or millions of terabytes.
Questions About Magnetic Tape Storage
Why do data centers still use magnetic tape instead of hard drives or the cloud?
Large data centers hold petabytes of infrequently accessed data where magnetic tapes offer a combination of high capacity, low operating costs, and offline security. Tape drives and media also require zero electricity while sitting in storage racks.
What limits the use of magnetic tape for regular computer users?
Using the latest generation of magnetic tape requires specialized drives that represent a high initial investment. External hard drives, network-attached storage units, or cloud backups remain more practical for home users managing a few terabytes.
How much data fits on a single LTO-10 tape cassette?
A single LTO-10 cassette holds 30 or 40 terabytes of uncompressed data based on the chosen variant. Manufacturers state that capacities can reach 75 or 100 terabytes if the stored files achieve a 2.5 to 1 data compression ratio.
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