Hopefully I posted this in the right forum. I ask this question because of all the more convenient storage media we have today: zip disks, memory sticks, USB pen drives, external media drives, network backup, DVD/CD burning hardware. Tape drives need to be accessed in a sequential read, all of this modern storage media can be accessed using random reads. The only use of tape storage media I can understand is if somebody has some tape backups they made years ago and they need to get at the data on them.