I used to sell tape drives at Oracle. There is certainly a lot of smarts going into designing a tape drive, but 5k for an enterprise is cheap compared to 23k or

I used to sell tape drives at Oracle. There is certainly a lot of smarts going into designing a tape drive, but 5k for an enterprise is cheap compared to 23k or more for a proprietary drive with double the read/write. What I think really happened in this industry was that the higher ups laid off all the tape engineers (mostly US based) and just decided to go all in on the "everything on an SSD!" paradigm. It's outsourced to Asia, it works for maybe 90% of corporate workloads, and it makes the Big IT cartel a ton more money than LTO does :/