Your comment inspired me to do some math: I have an old 24 tape robot I haven't used in a while. Priced out a used LTO8 drive and 24 LTO7 tapes, and assuming

Your comment inspired me to do some math: I have an old 24 tape robot I haven't used in a while. Priced out a used LTO8 drive and 24 LTO7 tapes, and assuming that they're formatted M8 to 9TB, it still costs out to $0.02/GB-- so only just breaking even with the 12TB USB3 external drives. You need a lot of tapes before LTO starts comparing favorably to current drive prices even using LTO7 tapes. :( like 1PB before it's really attractive.