[cawigames]

Tape still has big advantages over other mediums: it's relatively cheap in terms of price/Gb, it's a lot less complex than hard drives, and a lot more recoverable than SSDs.

On the other side, it has minute-long seek times since the tape needs to be rewonund/ff (that's an eternity compared to already-deprecated milisecond-long HDD seek times) and it's not suitable for many write cycles (some tapes are even sold as WORM (write once read many), same as the old CD-R drives)