Quantum has started the pre-purchase program for LTO-7 drives which indicates that the drives will very soon be availble for purchase. With a Native capacity of 6.4TB ( 16TB with compression) and over 1TB/hr native (2.8TB/hr with compression), these drives will be the highest capacity and most densely populated tapes today , exceeding the capacity of even 3592 higher tapes.
As usual LTO-7 drive will be read/write compatible with LTO-6 tapes, so the current LTO-6 users can safely upgrade without having to convert their existing LTO-6 tapes to the new format.
