Latency is absolutely killer with tapes, but bandwidth is still a major issue. The current generation LTO-9 is only capable of 400MB/s in throughput. That's s

Latency is absolutely killer with tapes, but bandwidth is still a major issue. The current generation LTO-9 is only capable of 400MB/s in throughput. That's still slower than a SATA3 drive. Last time I used tape in earnest was a while back though (2005ish), LTO-2 ruled the roost at a whopping 40MB/s, with LTO-3 just making an appearance. Around the time I left the company they were building out a disk storage array as a backup target, and shifting tape further and further away from the main backup path. Data production and storage needs across the industry had long been growing at a greater rate than tape capacity and performance.