HP has started shipping the LTO-6 tape media, C7976A.
With a higher track density, LTO-6 offers 70% higher native capacity compared to LTO-5. With a compression rate of 2.5 ( which is data dependent) the compressed capacity would be 6.25 TB !
The transfer rates also have changed apart from the native capacity. LTO-6 claims a transfer rate of 1.4TB per hour to accomodate shrinking backup window.
In practice we have seen many businesses still using LTO-4 and not migrating to LTO-5 yet. Hopefully the LTO-6 would give such businesses a reason to upgrade from LTO-4 to LTO-6 and benefit from higher capacities per tape and faster backups.
