On 7/18/2020 2:41 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:
I can't tell if you're serious. I mean, obviously not, but no smiley
anywhere, so I'm not sure.

Tape has never been a viable random access medium and never will be.
If you're a glutton for punishment, I suppose you could use it for archival
purposes, but even that's a stretch these days. Check with your local
museum to see if they have a tape system they're willing to part with.
There's a reason why all of the big data storage organizations use hard
drives exclusively.

That's exactly the point! Modern HDD designs are taking away their
random access features and replacing them with serial-access features.
If you're going to be using serial-access devices, then it might as well
be tapes. All of the random access is beginning to be done (and done
better) through SSD's, so with tape capacity being higher than HDD's,
and random-access features being better on SSD's, HDD's are going to be
squeezed out.

Yousuf Khan