It used to be true with DAT tapes. I've not seen it on LTO. Where I work we either had very large tape libraries, with 25+ drives in. We didn't have drive affi

It used to be true with DAT tapes. I've not seen it on LTO. Where I work we either had very large tape libraries, with 25+ drives in. We didn't have drive affinity, so if that happened I would get an alert. The other team used to import bulk data by receiving tapes from all over london and beyond, there must have been thousands of drives writing and reading that data. Plus we didn't buy fresh tapes, and they were dropped, thrown, left in the cold/sun, all sorts. I think LTO is pretty solid.