[El_RIDO]

I'd like to suggest two arguments that made me use software encryption on my tapes instead: 1. You don't have to trust the hardware and can use tool I trust and have the sources for. 2. If you encrypt yourself you can combine it with something like par2 to generate error detection and recovery data, letting you restore the encrypted file off a damaged tape.

A downside of encrypting yourself is that you can't benefit from the hardware compression either, hence the articles suggestion to do that in software before compressing as well.

Personally, my tape writing workflow is: dar (per file compression, skips uncompressable mime types + encryption) followed by par2cmdline with 30% redundancy. For comparison: CD-ROMs have 33% redundancy information (8 bits per 24 bits, CIRC encoding).