During the innovative fourth quarter of 2017, HPE, IBM, and Quantum proclaimed a new feature of LTO-8 drives.

Their ground-breaking announcement was the first of its kind: LTO-7 media initialized as LTO-8 Type M media.

Essentially, the Type M media gives an LTO-8 tape drive the ability to write 9 TB native and 22.5 TB compressed capacity (assuming 2.5:1 compression) using standard LTO-7 media.

However, the Type M media can only take advantage the increased capacity when using an LTO-8 drive combined with an unused LTO-7 cartridge.

It is the specialized Type M barcode that makes the LTO-8 tape drive write to the LTO-7 tape cartridge, thus creating more volume on the media.