Sanity restored to LTO drive prices

For the past six months, standalone LTO-2 drives have cost significantly more than their higher performance, higher capacity LTO-3 brethren--about 19% more. This month, LTO-2 drives decreased by 5.7% while LTO-3 increased by 3.4%, bringing them to within approximately 9% of one another. LTO-3 media pricing, however, dropped another 5.4%, to less than $100 per cartridge ($99). LTO-3 therefore continues to maintain the lowest cost per gigabyte of the two ($0.12/GB vs. LTO-2's $0.14/GB).

--Alex Barrett

Hard disk drives

Tape drives

Media

All charts are average cost per unit