Independent methodology by The LTO Show · vendor-agnostic.
See taxonomy
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 — Tape:
7
%/yr
Maintenance — Disk:
7
%/yr
Cloud has no additional maintenance line (provider-managed).
Staff wage:
$135,520
/FTE
Tape Library
5
LTO drive / media generation
LTO-8 (12 TB)
LTO-9 (18 TB)
LTO-10 (30 TB)
LTO-10 (40 TB)
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
?
Seagate Exos X18 — 18 TB
Seagate Exos X22 — 22 TB
Seagate Exos X24 — 24 TB
Seagate Exos M — 30 TB
11
RAID level
?
RAID-Z2 (≈RAID-6) — 0.831
RAID-Z1 (≈RAID-5) — 0.891
RAID-Z3 — 0.772
Drive + RAID auto-size enclosures, expansions, power & cost.
Cloud
12
Cloud provider
AWS Deep Glacier Archive
Backblaze B2
Wasabi
Cloudflare R2
13
Cloud recall SLA
Bulk
Standard
14
Monthly retrieval:
2.0
%
15
Avg object size:
1 GB
16
Overrun multiplier:
1.17
?
17
Restore staging:
7
days
Update Results
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