But the truth is, that kind of bandwidth is expensive, and data stores are only getting larger. Furthermore, the cost of ATA storage is beginning to rival that of an individual tape with similar capacity. That much is clear.
What is less apparent are the associated costs of spinning a disk. As heat dissipation stresses your data-center cooling system and the UPS load increases, electricity expenditures will rise up like a zombie in Dawn of the Dead. These are facts that most disk-to-disk vendors don't want to talk about.
Other disk downfalls include long-term storage and backward compatibility. Disk technology changes more rapidly than tape. And because of the need for long-term storage, tape generally has a much longer cycle and planned backward compatibility.
Another advantage of tape is the very nature of the medium, which is separated from the read/write drive mechanism. So if your tape drive breaks, you simply plug in another piece of hardware and you're back in business. With disk, the media and read/write drive mechanisms are one piece, which should be serviced only in a class-100 clean room.
Of course, the vendors can piddle back and forth all day--the disadvantage of the married media and drive mechanisms can be mitigated (but not eliminated) by RAID schemes. Tapes need to be barcoded, and handled and stored. Yada yada.
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