LTO tape cartridges sorted by price per TB. The lowest cost-per-TB storage medium available.
The cheapest storage medium available. LTO tape at ~$5/TB beats all other storage technologies on raw cost per terabyte.
If your tape drive supports LTO-9, buy LTO-9 media. At $5/TB it is the cheapest storage medium available. LTO-9 drives read LTO-8 tapes, so existing libraries are compatible. Single cartridges suit testing and small volumes. 10 and 20-pack library packs offer lower per-cartridge cost for production use. Fuji and Quantum are the tier-1 manufacturers - both use BaFe media.
| $/TB ▲ | Brand / Model | Cap | Interface | Tech | Cache | Sector | Wty | Price | Cond. | 90D | Buy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
👑$4.89 ~ 30d avg | Fuji LTO-9 Ultrium 10-Pack 18TB LTO Ultrium 9 2yr | 18TB | LTO-9 | BaFe | — | — | 2yr | $879.99 | new | Buy →Details | ▼ | |
$5.31 ~ 30d avg | Quantum LTO-9 Ultrium 20-Pack 18TB MR-L9MQN-01 2yr | 18TB | LTO-9 | BaFe | — | — | 2yr | $1,909.89 | new | Buy →Details | ▼ | |
$5.50 ~ 30d avg | HPE LTO-9 Ultrium Single 18TB Q2079A | 18TB | LTO-9 | BaFe | — | — | — | $98.99 | new | Buy →Details | ▼ | |
$6.42 ~ 30d avg | Quantum LTO-8 Ultrium 20-Pack 12TB MR-L8MQN-20 2yr | 12TB | LTO-8 | BaFe | — | — | 2yr | $1,539.80 | new | Buy →Details | ▼ | |
$6.50 ~ 30d avg | Fuji LTO-8 Ultrium Single 12TB LTO Ultrium 8 2yr | 12TB | LTO-8 | BaFe | — | — | 2yr | $77.99 | new | Buy →Details | ▼ | |
$10.83 ~ 30d avg | Quantum LTO-7 Ultrium Single 6TB MR-L7MQN-01 | 6TB | LTO-7 | BaFe | — | — | — | $64.99 | new | Buy →Details | ▼ |
LTO-9 offers 18TB native capacity (45TB compressed) versus LTO-8's 12TB. LTO-9 drives can read LTO-8 tapes, so buy LTO-9 media if your drive supports it. LTO-8 remains the sweet spot for existing library installs.
10 and 20-packs are significantly cheaper per cartridge. Singles make sense for testing compatibility or very small volumes. For bulk archival, always buy library packs.
Barium Ferrite (BaFe) is the standard coating for LTO-8 and LTO-9. It offers superior stability, longer archival life (30+ years), and better environmental tolerance compared to older Metal Particle (MP) media.
At ~$5/TB, LTO beats S3 Glacier ($4/TB/month) within months when factoring retrieval costs. Amortize the tape drive over 3+ years of archive volume. LTO wins for compliance, air-gapped security, and large datasets.
Every LTO generation is sold on two capacity figures and only one of them is a property of the cartridge. LTO-9 is marketed as a 45TB tape; it holds 18TB. The larger number assumes your data compresses, and the LTO Program says so in a footnote:
“Assuming a 2.5:1 compression achieved with larger compression history buffer available beginning with LTO generation 6 drives”
Vendor documentation Compression assumption and LTO-9 capacities from The LTO Program Releases Specifications for Upcoming Generation 9, The LTO Program (lto.org). Read 20 August 2026.
A 2.5:1 ratio is achievable on text, logs, databases and virtual-machine images. It is not achievable on the things most people actually archive at this scale — video, photographs, and anything already compressed arrives at the drive incompressible, and comes off the tape at close to 1:1. Size an archive on the native figure and treat any compression you get as a bonus. Size it on the marketing figure and you will be short of cartridges, which on a tape library is not a cheap mistake to discover late.
| Generation | Native per cartridge | Marketed (2.5:1 assumed) | Cheapest native $/TB in stock | Listings in stock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LTO-7 | 6TB | 15TB | $10.83 | 1 |
| LTO-8 | 12TB | 30TB | $6.42 | 2 |
| LTO-9 | 18TB | 45TB | $4.89 | 3 |
Tape is sold as singles and as 10 or 20-cartridge packs, and the pack price is for the whole pack while the capacity on the box is per cartridge. Dividing one by the other gives a number twenty times too large. We had exactly that bug in our own data until this was written: a 20-pack of 12TB LTO-8 was reading as $123.83/TB when the honest native figure is $6.19/TB. Every table now divides by the pack quantity first.
| Listing | Pack | Listing price | Per cartridge | Native $/TB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fuji LTO-9 Ultrium 10-Pack 18TB | 10× | $879.99 | $88.00 | $4.89 |
| Quantum LTO-9 Ultrium 20-Pack 18TB | 20× | $1909.89 | $95.49 | $5.31 |
| Quantum LTO-8 Ultrium 20-Pack 12TB | 20× | $1539.80 | $76.99 | $6.42 |
On that basis the cheapest native terabyte of tape we currently track is the Fuji LTO-9 Ultrium 10-Pack 18TB at $4.89/TB - a 10-cartridge pack, which is the usual answer once the naive division is corrected. Singles remain worth buying to test a library before committing to a pack, and 3 are in stock.
The widely repeated rule is that an LTO drive reads two generations back and writes one back. The LTO Program does state that, but only for the older generations:
“LTO drive generations 1-7 are able to read tapes from two generations prior and are able to write to tapes from the prior generation.”
From LTO-8 onwards it no longer holds. An LTO-8 drive reads and writes LTO-8 and LTO-7 only — not LTO-6. An LTO-9 drive reads and writes LTO-9 and LTO-8 only — not LTO-7. This is the fact most likely to cost somebody money on this page: upgrade a library on the old rule and you may end up with a drive that cannot read the archive you already own. Check what your existing cartridges are before choosing the drive generation, and keep the old drive if the archive predates the window.
| Drive generation | Reads | Writes |
|---|---|---|
| LTO-7 and earlier | Its own generation and the two before it | Its own generation and the one before it |
| LTO-8 | LTO-8 and LTO-7 only (including LTO-7 Type M) | LTO-8 and LTO-7 only (including LTO-7 Type M) |
| LTO-9 | LTO-9 and LTO-8 only | LTO-9 and LTO-8 only |
| LTO-10 | LTO-10 only - a discontinuity, not a further narrowing step; zero backward compatibility | LTO-10 only - a discontinuity, not a further narrowing step; zero backward compatibility |
Vendor documentation Read/write compatibility per generation from LTO Generation Compatibility Details, The LTO Program (lto.org). Read 17 September 2026.
This page prices media only. For the drive itself - live prices, the real entry cost with a host bus adapter and cleaning cartridge, and this same compatibility rule applied per-generation - see the tape drives hub. If you already own a drive and are only sizing whether tape is worth it, the break-even page computes the archive size where tape's media savings pay back a drive's cost, live.
On media alone, LTO-9 is currently 23.8% cheaper per native terabyte than LTO-8 — $4.89/TB against $6.42/TB, from 3 and 2 in-stock listings respectively. Those are cheapest-listing figures, so read them as what these particular cartridges cost rather than as where the generation is priced.
The media comparison is also the smaller half of the decision. A tape drive costs substantially more than the cartridges it will ever hold for a small archive - see live tape drive prices and the archive size at which tape's media savings pay back that drive cost against live disk $/TB, computed rather than assumed. If you already own an LTO-8 drive, the media question is settled for you: LTO-9 cartridges will not work in it, and LTO-8 media is still in production. The upgrade case rests on drive cost and on how much you are storing, not on the per-terabyte media gap.
Where LTO-8 still wins outright: an existing LTO-8 library, an archive of LTO-7 cartridges that an LTO-9 drive cannot read, and any deployment where the total archive is small enough that fewer, larger cartridges do not save a slot. Where LTO-9 wins: anything green-field at scale, because 18TB native per cartridge means fewer cartridges, fewer slots and fewer mounts for the same archive.
LTO is an open format with multiple licensed manufacturers, and a cartridge of a given generation works in any drive of a compatible generation regardless of who made it. We track 4 media brands and the tables above rank them on price alone, because within a generation that is genuinely the difference. Buy on price and availability; check the generation, not the logo.
An LTO-9 tape drive, and generation matters more than brand: per lto.org's own compatibility page, LTO-9 drives read and write LTO-8 and LTO-9 media only - they cannot read LTO-7 or older. We track live tape drive prices and autoloaders separately, including the real entry cost with a compatible host bus adapter and cleaning cartridge, and the archive size at which tape's media savings pay back that drive cost.
At $5/TB, LTO-9 tape media has the lowest upfront storage cost available - before the drive. The drive itself is a real cost that changes the answer by archive size, not a fixed amortization figure: we compute the actual break-even archive size live from current drive and media prices rather than quoting one number for every reader.
Barium Ferrite (BaFe) is the magnetic particle technology used in LTO-8 and LTO-9 tape media. It replaced Metal Particle (MP) media from LTO-7. BaFe offers superior data stability (30+ year archival life), higher coercivity for higher density, and better resistance to humidity compared to MP.
Yes. LTO is an open standard - Fuji, Quantum, HPE and IBM tape cartridges are interchangeable in any LTO-compatible tape drive or library regardless of brand. Choose based on price and availability.