With the demise of the VHS tapes then, the public has lost the habit of tape storage. In fact, children under 10 have never had to see a tape of their lives. But in business, bands are resisting. They are still widely used for archival purposes. Their large capacity, low cost and high reliability have historically been the media of choice for this purpose. But they are increasingly facing competition from hard drives. One LTO-4 does contain 800 GB of data, one LTO-5 up to 1.5 TB, while the 2TB hard drives exist and the 3TB do not delay.

Not to be outdone, the proponents of LTO specifications announced the next generation of bands, the LTO-6, 7 and 8. The LTO-6 will provide a capacity of 3.2 TB and a transfer rate of 210 Mb / s. The compression ratio is improved to 2.5:1 which will reach 8 TB capacity and 525 MB / s These scores will further increase the generation 7 (6.4 TB and 315 MB / s native, 16 TB and 788 MB / s compressed) and generation 8 (12.8 TB and 472 MB / s native, 32 TB and 1180 MB / s compressed). Numbers that make heads turn. Yes, but here it is: the LTO-4 were introduced in 2007, the LTO-5 are barely on the market. If rhythm does not accelerate, it will have to wait 2013 to see the LTO-6, 2016 for LTO-7 and 2019 for the LTO-8.

Recall that side of hard drives, it must without much difficulty multiply by 2.5 the current capacity, and researchers think that even tenfold using technology Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording and Patterned Media. It remains to be seen which of two technologies take other speed.