In a conversation on the Fediverse, I had some feelings on tapes versus disks :

I wish tape drives and tape robots were cheaper. At work economics made us switch to backups on HDDs, and apart from other issues it quietly bugs me that every one of them bundles in a complex read-write mechanism on top of the (magnetic) storage that's what we really want.

(But those complex read/write mechanisms are remarkably inexpensive due to massive volume, while the corresponding tape drive+robot read/write mechanism is ... not.)

(I've written up our backup system , also .)

As you can read in many places, hard drives are mechanical marvels, made to extremely fine tolerances, high performance targets, and startlingly long lifetimes (all things considered). And you can get them for really quite low prices.

At a conceptual level, an LTO tape system is the storage medium (the LTO tape) separated from the read/write head and the motors (the tape drive). When you compare this to hard drives, you get to build and buy the 'tape drive' portion only once, instead of including a copy in each instance of the storage medium (the tapes). In theory this should make the whole collection a lot cheaper. In practice it only does so once you have a quite large number of tapes, because the cost of tape drives (and tape robots to move tapes in and out of the drives) is really quite high ( and has been for a relatively long time ).

There are probably technology challenges and complexities that come with the tape drive operating in an unsealed and less well controlled environment than hard disk mechanisms. But it's hard to avoid the assumption that a lot of the price difference has to do with the vast difference in volume. We make hard drives and thus all of their components in high volume, and have for decades, so there's been a lot of effort spent on making them inexpensively and in bulk. Tape drives are a specialty item with far lower production volumes and are sold to much less price sensitive buyers (as compared to consumer level hard drives, which have a lot of parts in common with 'enterprise' HDDs).

I understand all of this but it still bugs me a bit. It's perfectly understandable but inelegant.