The reasons for using tape in the past were capacity, and cost. With
the high compression made possible with Laservault backup, and the
continually plumetting cost of disk drives, there is no economic or
operational aadvantage in using tape today.
Tape is open-air technology – the disk is hermetically sealed. Disk heads
do not touch the magnetic media. Tapes can easily become damaged if
they are dropped, through crimping of the tape. Although tape alignment problems are not the issue that they once were, a sealed disk drive always uses the same heads and alignment to
read the data, as the data was written with.
