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Is there something about tape HW itself that’s inherently complex and expensive? Or is it just that the target market is enterprise and so the manufacturers are

Is there something about tape HW itself that’s inherently complex and expensive? Or is it just that the target market is enterprise and so the manufacturers are able to price discriminate more effectively? Regardless, I doubt tape is a good consumer solution because it’s primarily for archival. That means that retrieving data is super slow (average seek time is ~1 minute). On the other hand, given that’s for an 18TiB cartridge, you might be able to cut that drastically by using less capacity. So it would be interesting if someone attempted a consumer play with tape, I just don’t know what the business model would look like since most customers rely on the cloud for archival to offload the technical and physical maintenance parts of the problem.

toast0 3y ago
It's probably a mix. Consumer tape drives used to exist, but uptake was low. And really, most consumers want to ignore backups and hope nothing bad happens (which usually works out ok). Something like a cost reduced two generations old LTO tape drive might work, but of course it has to compete with surplus two generations old LTO tape drives and be careful not to attract the business of enterprise which should be buying the current drives. Anyway, I'm not sure how much cost reduction is possible --- there's a lot of precision movement required. Edit: also, at least in the current market, I doubt many consumers have enough data to make tape economical. An online array of rotational drives, plus backup to and rotation of external drives is probably a better fit for consumers, and a lot of enterprises.