At this point you are probably buying an IBM LTO tape drive no matter the label on the front. If you're buying a library, I don't really see any reason not to

At this point you are probably buying an IBM LTO tape drive no matter the label on the front. If you're buying a library, I don't really see any reason not to go with IBM "Enterprise Tape". It blows LTO out of the water in capacity and performance, and the media upward and downward compatibility are astonishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3592 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3592 LTO was an interesting period and probably most useful for media professionals that have single tape drive decks. But the real market for tape is massive silos where the tapes sit reliably, dutifully, and not using any power while holding massive quantities of data. And if you have to use a "proprietary" tape cartridge and drive to do it, I fail to see how that's any different than the proprietary disks, disk bus interfaces, or flash and FTLs. On the other side you're talking FC or SAS or Ethernet, same as disk/flash talking SAS or NVMe.