If your drive breaks down while you’re trying to do a restore, you’re going to want to get a spare one quickly. That may become a problem if you choose not to stay current.
In which case I'm going to eBay where I probably got the original drive in the first place over 10 years ago, and a quick look finds thousands of listings for both standalone and internal drives, at good prices, from reputable sellers with good history, going all the way back to LTO2 (which is almost 2 decades old!).
This is what I mean, LTO sits in this niche where it is/was popular in the enterprise and so the secondhand market is big. I would be willing to wager that I will be able to find LTO 6 drives in another 10 years, with no problem.
