The problem with really high capacity tape these days is there's almost literally 1 vendor for drives and tapes, which is even worse than the 3 companies worldwide that manufacture hard drives. If you want relatively not so fast storage for a lot of terabytes, I bet I could clone a backblaze storage pod with some modifications and achieve a better $/TB ratio than an enterprise priced tape solution.
There are at least 2 manufacturers for tapes (Fujifilm and Sony), but their tapes are also sold under many other brands (e.g. IBM, Quantum, HP).
The price per TB is currently about $7 or less (per real TB of LTO-8, not per marketing compressed TB), so there is no chance to approach the cost and reliability of tapes using HDDs.
The problem with tapes is that currently the tape drives are very expensive, because their market is small, so you need to store a lot of data before the difference in price between HDDs and tapes exceeds the initial expense for the tape drive.
Nevertheless, if you want to store data for many years, investing in a tape drive may be worthwhile just for the peace of mind, because when storing HDDs for years you can never be sure how will they work when operated again.
> Nevertheless, if you want to store data for many years, investing in a tape drive may be worthwhile just for the peace of mind, because when storing HDDs for years you can never be sure how will they work when operated again.
You'd actually need two tape drives to be reasonably secure, because getting a SATA adapter is much easier if your current setup is broken and you need to access the data either many years later (when technology moved on) or right now.
Having your data on a few hard drives combined with some check-summing and somewhat regular checking is probably easier. Or a combination of both - two different storage systems with two different failure modes are a lot safer. But when you're going that way the break even moves even farther away.
