Cost comparison
Over five years, 100 TB costs about $5,532 in AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive against $8,564 to $14,103 for one LTO-9 tape copy including the drive, and at 500 TB tape costs $18,607 to $30,270 against $27,660 for cloud.
The numbers
Tape here is LTO-9 at $92.45 to $129.00 per 18 TB cartridge plus a new internal drive at $8,009 to $13,329 (two drives from 500 TB up, so a copy can be read back while another is written). Cloud is AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099 per GB-month in US East (N. Virginia), one copy, kept for the full five years. The restore column is what it costs to pull the whole archive out of Glacier once, at bulk retrieval plus internet egress.
| Archive | Tape, one copy | Tape, two copies | Glacier Deep Archive, 5 years | One full restore from Glacier | Break-even, one tape copy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 TB | $8,286 to $13,716 3 cartridges, 1 drive | $8,564 to $14,103 | $2,766 | $4,307 | 15.0 to 24.8 years |
| 100 TB | $8,564 to $14,103 6 cartridges, 1 drive | $9,118 to $14,877 | $5,532 | $8,615 | 7.7 to 12.7 years |
| 500 TB | $18,607 to $30,270 28 cartridges, 2 drives | $21,195 to $33,882 | $27,660 | $43,074 | 3.4 to 5.5 years |
| 1,000 TB | $21,195 to $33,882 56 cartridges, 2 drives | $26,373 to $41,106 | $55,321 | $86,147 | 1.9 to 3.1 years |
These are list prices for media, drives and storage. They exclude racks, staff, software, cloud request charges and the disk you stage data on at either end.
Watch
Reading the table
At 100 TB, cloud archive is cheaper over five years. A 100 TB archive costs about $5,532 in Glacier Deep Archive for five years, while one tape copy costs $8,564 to $14,103, most of it the drive. The tape only pays for itself after 7.7 to 12.7 years at that size.
Around 500 TB the two meet. One tape copy of 500 TB costs $18,607 to $30,270 against $27,660 for five years of Glacier, so tape is clearly cheaper at the low end of drive pricing and about level if you pay top of market. It breaks even in 3.4 to 5.5 years. At 1 PB the drive is a rounding error: media alone is $5,177 to $7,224, a one-off cost against $55,321 of storage fees.
The reason is simple. A tape drive is a fixed cost that does not care how much data you have; cartridges then cost about $5.14 to $7.17 per TB once. Cloud archive has no entry cost and bills every month forever.
Restores
Reading an archive back from tape costs drive time. Reading it back from cloud archive costs money: pulling 100 TB out of Glacier Deep Archive is about $8,615 at bulk retrieval ($0.0025 per GB) plus internet egress ($0.09 per GB), and standard retrieval is $0.02 per GB instead of $0.0025.
Two details decide whether that number ever lands on your invoice:
Azure Archive charges the same $0.00099 per GB-month as Deep Archive but has no bulk tier: retrieving 1 TB is $18.63 at standard priority against $2.33 on AWS, before egress.
Provider prices
| Service | $/GB-month | 100 TB for 5 years | Retrieval per GB | Egress per GB | Minimum storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.00099 | $5,532 | $0.0025 bulk, $0.02 standard | $0.09 | 180 days |
| AWS S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | $0.0036 | $20,117 | $0.00 bulk, $0.01 standard | $0.09 | 90 days |
| Azure Blob Storage Archive | $0.00099 | $5,532 | $0.02 standard, $0.10 high priority | $0.087 | none |
| Google Cloud Storage Archive | $0.0012 | $6,706 | $0.05 | $0.12 | 365 days |
| Backblaze B2 | $0.00695 | $41,700 | none | $0.01 | none |
| Wasabi | $0.0078 | $43,601 | none | free within policy | 90 days |
US East (N. Virginia) list prices before committed-use discounts, taken from each provider's own pricing data on 2026-10-23. Notes that matter when you model this yourself:
What the table leaves out
Tape: a SAS HBA per drive, somewhere climate-controlled to keep cartridges, courier or vault fees for the offsite copy, backup software or LTFS tooling, a drive refresh every several years, and staff time to load, verify and label media. Budget one migration during a long retention period, because LTO-8 and LTO-9 drives read only one generation back and LTO-10 drives read none (see LTO tape migration).
Cloud: upload requests, minimum storage duration, early-deletion fees, retrieval tiers, egress, and the chance that list prices change during a ten-year retention. The full restore cost belongs in the budget even if you never plan to use it, because that is what a disaster looks like.
Both: the staging disk at each end, and the second copy you should keep either way. Most teams end up with disk for recent restores, tape for offline retention and a cloud copy for site loss, which is the 3-2-1 split rather than a single winner.
Pricebook
Request current LTO media and drive pricing before you budget a migration or a refresh.
It depends on size and retention. At 100 TB over five years, AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs about $5,532 against $8,564 to $14,103 for one LTO-9 tape copy including a drive, so cloud is cheaper. At 500 TB tape costs $18,607 to $30,270 against $27,660 for cloud, so tape is level or cheaper, and by 1 PB it is less than half the cost.
About $8,615 at October 2026 list prices: $0.0025 per GB for bulk retrieval plus $0.09 per GB of internet egress. Standard retrieval costs $0.02 per GB instead.
At 100 TB, 7.7 to 12.7 years against Glacier Deep Archive. At 500 TB, 3.4 to 5.5 years. The drive is a fixed cost, so the more you store the faster it is repaid.
56 cartridges for one copy at 18 TB native each, about $5,177 to $7,224 of media. Compression does not help for already-compressed archive data.
AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive has the lowest headline rate here at $0.00099 per GB-month, and AWS is also far cheaper to read back because it offers a bulk retrieval tier. Wasabi and Backblaze cost more per month and include egress within policy limits.