LTO tape price trends - live $/TB history

Reading this chart without fooling yourself

The median line and the cheapest line answer different questions, and the gap between them is usually more informative than either. The median tracks the middle of the market. The cheapest line tracks the single best listing we could find that day, which is what you actually pay if you are willing to buy whatever is on offer rather than a specific model.

When the two move apart, supply is thinning at the cheap end while the broad market holds, or one seller has cut hard. When they move together, the whole category is repricing. A widening gap is the more common shape during a shortage, and it is the reason a headline “prices are up X%” can coexist with a genuinely good deal still being available.

Both lines are levels, and levels have a catch worth knowing before you quote one. The median moves when prices move and it also moves when the set of products we track changes. Add a batch of expensive drives to the catalogue and the median rises without a single seller touching a price. That is why the percentage figures in the tiles above are not median-to-median comparisons: they come from a basket that only ever compares a listing against its own earlier price, so a product arriving or leaving contributes nothing. The chart shows you where the market sits; the percentages show you which way it moved.

LTO-7, LTO-8 and LTO-9 media, priced per terabyte of native capacity. New and recertified are drawn as separate lines because they are separate markets with separate supply. Recertified enterprise stock arrives in batches as datacenters retire hardware, so its line steps rather than drifts, and a sharp fall there usually means a batch landed rather than that manufacturers cut prices.

One caution about the movers tables. A large percentage move on a cheap listing is a small number of dollars, and a listing can move because the seller changed or because stock ran out and a dearer seller became the cheapest offer for that product. Both are real things that happened to the price you would pay, which is why we show them, and neither is necessarily a manufacturer changing anything.

If you want the current market rather than its history, every lto tape we track is ranked by live cost per tb, and what counts as a good price sets the cross-category benchmark.

Citing this page

Quote a figure, link to the page, and tell readers where the number came from. That is ordinary citation and it needs no permission from us.

We do not offer this as an open dataset, and we removed an earlier notice that did. The underlying prices are retrieved under a licence that does not permit us to pass redistribution rights on to anyone else, so bulk reuse, republication of the series, or building a product on top of these numbers is something to ask about first rather than something we can grant in a footer. The contact page reaches us, and we would rather have the conversation than have you rely on a permission we cannot give.