OWC announces the Mercury Pro LTO tape backup solution starting at $4,399

Owc Mercury Pro Lto (Image credit: OWC)

What you need to know

OWC today announced the Mercury Pro LTP tape backup solution with prices starting at $4,399.
Buyers can choose two different types of backup software as part of the purchase, or go it alone.
Each tape can hold up to 30TB of storage.

OWC today announced the Mercury Pro LTO tape backup solution with prices starting at $4,399. Designed for business use rather than keeping your iCloud Photos safe, this thing supports tapes that can hold up to 30TB of compressed data.

Announced via press release, the OWC Mercury Pro LTO supports all kinds of tapes, but it's the LTO-8 tapes and their 30TB of compressed data that really take the biscuit. Prefer not to compress anything? You'll still get a full 12TB of data onto a single tape — although those tapes do retail for $119 when bought from OWC.

You can, of course, use older tapes as well.

Because LTO is an open standard with many support manufacturers and vendors, users can be confident of access their data with any brand of LTO hardware for decades to come. The Mercury Pro LTO is currently available with LTO-7 or LTO-8 drives providing native capacities of 2.5TB and 6TB (LTO-7), 6TB, 9TB, and 12TB (LTO-8), and is designed to support the future release of LTO-9 drives later this year.

The OWC Mercury Pro LTO highlights include:

Store more: up to 6TB native/15TB compressed1 on the LTO-7 drive or 12TB native/30TB compressed1 storage capacity per tape cartridge
Flexible: The LTO-7 drive will read LTO-7, and read and write LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes while the LTO-8 Drive reads and writes LTO-8, LTO-M8, and LTO-7 tapes
Store longer: 30-year or greater tape longevity
Instant ROI: Lowest cost storage format; as low as $0.02/GB and up to 50x less costly than online storage
Full LTFS Support: archive files/folders with drag and drop ease
Compliance ready: supports WORM cartridges required by legal/regulatory record keeping
Fast tape creation: up to 300MB/s native/750MB/s2 compressed transfer rates
Configurable drive bay: add an optional 2.5/3.5-inch SSD for up to 16TB onboard storage capacity

Those looking to get software to go with their hardware can take advantage of deals on ArGest Backup or the myLTO software as well, with prices also available for those who want to buy tapes with the hardware, too.

You can learn more and place your orders over on the OWC website now.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.