The LTO Show — Storage TCO Calculator

General

1 Beginning capacity: 720 TB

2 Data growth: 25%/yr

3 Energy: $0.144/kWh

4 Retention: 5 yr

Advanced assumptions — for power users; defaults are sourced, and tuning these rarely changes the ranking

PUE ?: 1.54

Floor: $200/sq ft·yr

Contract discount: 0%

CO₂e price: $186/t

Grid carbon: 0.40 kg/kWh

Staff: 0.10 FTE/PB ?

Maintenance: 5%/yr

Staff wage: $135,520/FTE

Tape Library

5 LTO drive / media generation

6 Media unit price ?

7 Expansion frames: 0

Each adds a 40-slot expansion frame. Recommended for libraries over ~200–250 cartridges.

8 Additional tape drives: 0

Adds a matching LTO drive (throughput). Max 2 drives per frame.

Disk / SSD Storage

9 Storage system

10 Reference drive ?

11 RAID level ?

Drive + RAID auto-size enclosures, expansions, power & cost.

Cloud

12 Cloud provider

13 Cloud recall SLA

14 Monthly retrieval: 2.0%

15 Avg object size: 1 GB

16 Overrun multiplier: 1.17 ?

17 Restore staging: 7 days