Fujifilm has announced its release of its first LTO7 cartridges, supporting the new high speed, high capacity refresh of the venerable tape archiving format.

The LTO-7 format offers a raw capacity of 6 TB per cartridge, which is about 2.4 times the capacity of LTO-6 cartridges. With compression, maximum capacity rises to up to 15 TB per cartridge, or double that of LTO-6. LTO-7 tape drives feature data-transfer rates of up to 750 MBps compressed, or more than 2.7 TBs per hour, per drive.

Fujifilm believes the use of magnetic tape is actually gaining in popularity, especially at major data centres, thanks to its storage capacity, portability, energy efficiency, total cost of ownership and suitability for long-term storage. The demand for magnetic tape is expected to increase further with the spread of supercomputer use in the areas of genetic analysis and drug development; and advances in the IoT (Internet of Things).

In order to boost the product's storage capacity, Fujifilm says it has achieved high-precision magnetic particle dispersion, has made the magnetic layers thinner, and has reduced minor defects for a better error rate.