Tapes have become "enterprise" gear.. that is why they are expensive. HD's are looking to replicate those markups if the pricing on WD reds vs the usb drives are any indication.
There was a time that a tape drives cost about the same as a floppy/zip/etc drive. AKA a hundred to two bucks.
In the early 1990's QIC80 tapes were pretty popular in certain circles as an exchange medium since they fit a hundred or so floppies in a package that was smaller and a little thicker. Later things like the 3080 and the like bumped the capacity into the GB range for similar pricing.
Back then pretty much ever novell/etc server in existence had a tape drive in the front being used as a backup mechanism. The sysadmin dropped a tape in on friday, and took it offsite on monday (or whatever). In unix land it was possible to completely single step boot from tape and recover using things like AIX's mksysb. The death of tape, wasn't really a death so much as a giant margin increase, where a drive that cost $200 suddenly cost $2000 and came with a fibre channel interface rather than IDE..
There was a time that a tape drives cost about the same as a floppy/zip/etc drive. AKA a hundred to two bucks.
In the early 1990's QIC80 tapes were pretty popular in certain circles as an exchange medium since they fit a hundred or so floppies in a package that was smaller and a little thicker. Later things like the 3080 and the like bumped the capacity into the GB range for similar pricing.
Back then pretty much ever novell/etc server in existence had a tape drive in the front being used as a backup mechanism. The sysadmin dropped a tape in on friday, and took it offsite on monday (or whatever). In unix land it was possible to completely single step boot from tape and recover using things like AIX's mksysb. The death of tape, wasn't really a death so much as a giant margin increase, where a drive that cost $200 suddenly cost $2000 and came with a fibre channel interface rather than IDE..