The LTO Consortium has announced the capabilities of gen 6, 7 and 8 as follows. By the way, Generation 5 is now shipping in evaluation quantities at native 1.6 Terabytes per cartridge. The compression referred to is of course lossless

SILICON VALLEY, CALIF., April 14, 2010 — The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program
Technology Provider Companies, HP, IBM and Quantum, today announced the extension of its
product roadmap, providing details for two new generations.
Generations 7 and 8 have been added to the LTO product roadmap, calling for native
capacities of 6.4 TB and 12.8 TB, respectively. Specifications include a larger compression
history buffer which tests show can increase compression to 2.5 to 1. This can allow
compressed cartridge capacities of 8 TB for generation 6, 16 TB for generation 7 and 32 TB for
generation 8, helping users to store more data in less space and address cost control
objectives.
Tape drive data transfer rates are anticipated to increase by 50 percent with each new
generation, with plans for generation 6 to provide native transfer rates up to 210 MB per second,
generation 7 up to 315 MB per second and generation 8 up to 472 MB per second.