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That's the problem, tape isn't going anywhere. A decade back, it boasted a huge capacity advantage. Now with all the newer tech, the spinning media storage advantages, etc, it can barely hold a big drives worth of data. And the tape drives are expensive... Lto7 should hold like 50T on a this and dollar tape drive to look really interesting again.

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At scale, tape still has the lowest cost per byte of any storage medium.

It's true for sufficiently large values of “at scale” but tape has uniquely high overhead costs – hardware, software, staffing – which have to be balanced out by those lower storage costs. HDD/SSD costs have been declining at a much faster rate so we're already at the point where only the largest storage consumers are going to reach the point where they see a return from the initial investment in tape.

LTO-7 is 6.4TB uncompressed. LTO-10 is 48TB.

Hopefully we'll see LTO-7 this year but probably in 2016. That puts the diff between LTO6 and LTO7 at 4 years.

Extrapolating... LTO8 in 2020 LTO9 in 2024 LTO10 in 2028

LTO-10 would have ideally come in 2020 in keeping with LTO's earlier pace of 2 years per revision which is also more in line with storage increases

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