Just for fun: An LTO-8 tape is 960 m long and 5.6 µm thick. A standard-length ANSI-standard 9-track is 2,400 ft long and 0.0015 in thick. So naïvely assuming

Just for fun: An LTO-8 tape is 960 m long and 5.6 µm thick. A standard-length ANSI-standard 9-track is 2,400 ft long and 0.0015 in thick. So naïvely assuming you could spool about 2,400 ft * (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) worth of LTO-8 tape on a reel, we have 145161/28000 = (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) * (2400 ft / 960 m) so your imaginary LTO-8 reel could store around five times as much data as an ordinary LTO-8 cartridge, or about 60 TB. Sounds promising until you realize that, even assuming impossibly efficient cylinder-packing and no additional overhead for automation, a single 9-track reel takes about as much space to store as five LTO cartridges…