LTO10, LTO Ultrium 10 Data Cartridges

LTO Ultrium 10 tape cartridges and drives are the next generation of LTO, but they have not been released as yet! LTO10 drives and data cartridges are rumoured to be being released in the last quarter of 2025, so that should be October, November or December of 2025. While the capacity and backward compatibility of the LTO-10 drives and tapes has not been confirmed, we are assuming up to 36TB for native or uncompressed capacity and up to 90TB of compressed capacity as stated in the LTO Consortium LTO roadmap. The backward compatibility of LTO10 tape drives are yet to be confirmed, so we also assume it will not vary from the current backward compatibility of one generation to read and write. This means LTO10 tape drives should be able to read and write LTO9 tapes.