A gold star

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The media and entertainment industry is a big user of digital storage for content creation, post production, distribution and archiving. The current shortages of significantly increased the costs of solid-state storage. Although the prices of HDDs have risen as well, the cost of SSD storage capacity is now more than 20 times that of HDDs. A big focus of my discussions at the 2026 NAB show were about the shortage of digital storage and its impact on the industry.

The upcoming Coughlin Associates report on digital storage for the professional media and entertainment market anticipates a 9.8% cumulative annual growth rate, CAGR, for digital storage revenue, reaching close to $25B by 2021, as shown below.

Although the price of HDDs increased less than SSDs, they have still increased over 35% over the last year. HDDs are hard to get and this is prompting some media and entertainment customers to buy LTO magnetic tape and off-load less used content from their HDDs to their magnetic tape. The magnetic tape companies I saw at the show reported a significant uptake in interest in their products. So, the demand for storage capacity to support M&E workflows has flowed down the storage hierarchy and we should expect an increase in demand for magnetic tape capacity in 2026.

In addition to lower storage costs than SSDs and HDDs, LTO tape library systems consume less energy since the magnetic tapes consume no energy until they are loaded into tape drives. Magnetic tape technology has also continued to advance with up to 40TB LTO-10 tapes and tape drives available today. I will go into more detail on magnetic tape in this article and cover other storage in follow on pieces.

I discussed the current state of digital storage in the media and entertainment industry in a webinar with Keycode media that played the week before the NAB show.

I also heard at the show that IBM recently increased the price for LTO tape drives by 30% recently after some other drive increases in the recent past. It seems that magnetic tape vendors are also taking advantage of the intense market for storage to increase their margins. There were several LTO tape vendors with displays at the show, some, such as Magstor, shown below, promoting the relatively low price of tape storage, particularly for an LTO-8 tape system they were selling while supplies last. Magstor was also showing a Thunderbolt 5 tape drive system.

In addition to Magstor, several other tape storage vendors were at the show, including Spectra Logic, Quantum, Qualstar, Symply and others. I had a conversation with Skip Levens from Quantum about their data center focused low energy Tape storage system fitting into a single rack, Scalar I7 Raptor, shown below.

This was a two-drive unit on display with room for many more drives supporting 400MB/s per drive, and capable of 200PB of storage, using 10% of the energy of an equivalent HDD storage system. Skip was quite enthusiastic about the current opportunity for tape storage and storage systems like this one and for the software and hardware Quantum developed to support their tape storage platforms.

The media and entertainment industry is finding ways to deal with rising storage prices, including moving data from HDDs to tape to free up HDD capacity.