That's part of the solution, yes, but it's difficult to get the whole system set up this way and achieve something near maximum throughput. My understanding is

That's part of the solution, yes, but it's difficult to get the whole system set up this way and achieve something near maximum throughput. My understanding is that most people who use tape don't get anywhere near maximum throughput over the long term. Naive use of drives is still quite common... things like backing up with tar, or dumping a database straight to tape, and it's easy to imagine buffer starvation scenarios. Returning to the idea of increasing throughput on the drives by adding heads, I'm just doubtful that it would be the best way to improve overall system performance. For alternatives, you can either get engineers to optimize usage of existing drives or buy more drives.