You mean the tens of thousands of $$$ SSD in the topic?
This can be had right here, right now. Upgrade it to modern tech (LTO6), and you get ~2.5TB/tape for about $60/tape. That's still the absolute best capacity-to-cost ratio for bulk storage that you'll get in 2015.
LTO7 is just around the corner and that tops out at 6.5TB/tape.
Nobody is arguing that tape doesn't provide the best capacity per dollar. However I get the sense that tape hasn't kept up with spinning disks, let alone SDDs (on Moore's law).
It's just not the 50x factor it once was. More like 10x. Tape is on nobody's radar anymore, whereas as recently as 15 years ago it was still discussed by the mainstream IT commentariat. Gees I even remember PC Magazine recommending desktop users buy some DAT-based tape system. Now, tape is nowhere to be seen.
And that's not really surprising to me when you think that a petabyte of highly responsive spinning disk array can be done for less than a 150 grand, hotswap redundancy included. That's for a superfast 2-d medium as opposed to an eternity-seek-time 1-d medium. Spinning disk is a medium which can be used for live redundancy, a crucial requirement in the internet age.
Sure I think the NSA and GOOG might have need to archive exabytes onto tape. But that's not a mainstream market and for precisely 100% of hacker news readers, tape doesn't exist anymore.
Considering that I just picked up a 24 unit LTO5 stacker and a box of tapes for ~750, you may wish to decrement that 100% by a few points :)
The problem with live redundancy is just that, it's live. If your backups are live and online, they are not backups. (For the same reason that RAID is not backup, it's redundancy).
Think less "deployed broken code to prod" and more "this special snowflake server crashed" or "the datacenter caught on fire".
Disaster recovery.
The use case for tape is the same as the use case for something like Amazon Glacier. Perhaps you don't want multiple terabytes of your personal data being sent over the wire to a company who's no doubt been infiltrated by TLA's. Perhaps you want total control of your own data. Perhaps you don't want nasty surprises when it comes to Glacier's retrieval/data in/data out/you-didnt-wait-long-enough fees.
A single LTO5 drive can be had for about $300, tapes for $40/$50, and that'll get you around 2TB of storage each, more if your data compresses well.
Let's not pretend that there aren't real benefits to be had, here. Your use case isn't everyone else's use case, and certainly not enough to be making broad sweeping statements that nobody on HN uses it.
This can be had right here, right now. Upgrade it to modern tech (LTO6), and you get ~2.5TB/tape for about $60/tape. That's still the absolute best capacity-to-cost ratio for bulk storage that you'll get in 2015.
LTO7 is just around the corner and that tops out at 6.5TB/tape.