What we really need is for tape storage to become affordable. That's never likely to happen though. It will always remain a corporate backup solution and priced accordingly.

ETA: Now this would be nice to have in the basement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPDJ4zLOFfc

You missed it, there were "cheap" in relative terms tape drives that went on a floppy controller, for smaller office rather than datacenter use, in the mid 90s. Capacity wasn't spectacular, 40MB, but that would compete with using 30 something floppies. They had all the problems of audio compact cassettes for frequent use though, heads would get dirty, rollers would get either shiny or sticky, tapes would stretch in warm drive bays. All these technologies it seems like we get stuck with cheap/reliable/huge capacity, pick any two out of three.

edit: I guess more like late 80s, early 90s, QIC-40 and QIC-80 formats.

I remember looking into this in the very early 2000s and concluding that tape systems that had useful capacities were too expensive, while systems that were affordable were too limited in capacity. Nothing has changed in 20 years.

ETA: This was just before I bought my first DVD burner.

Tape was cheap back in the 90's, I had an Aiwa Qic80 drive, 120mb backup and I paid £20 or £30 for it brand new around 1995 and it ran off a floppy interface, A couple of years later I bought a 2gb Hp Surestore DAT, Think that cost me £80 and I had a 3gb and 2gb hdd at the time, That got plugged into an ISA Adaptec 1542. Again in 1997 I got my First Cd Writer, a Pnasonic 4x scsi Drive that I paid £200 for 2nd hand as a friend upgraded to a plextor, the problem I had now was my ISA scsi card wasnt fast enough to burn at 4x, so I think I ended up with a Pci adaptec 2904, just a basic scsi card but pci. Think it was £20 for 10 TDK Cdr's around the time.

This thread was starting to look like CDFreaks (now Myce) there for a while - I love it 🤣!

You're very welcome!
It was the least I could do - happy to help.... 😁😆

I don't miss burning discs, my burners were all quite loud especially the later ones. It is also annoying when a CD-R burn fails and you have to junk the disc, resulting in a heap of junk CD-Rs. At least CDRW could last a bit, my old 700MB Sony CDRW is still alive. The life span for good quality CD-Rs are quite ok, most of all my backups are still readable (mostly around 2006-2008). DVD-R should fare better but the capacity today even with dual layer ones is more trouble than is worth, unless you really need backups on a separate media. BD-R are not that cheap and aplenty here and the drives to read them too are getting hard to find, despite the bigger capacity.

It's a real shame that the 100GB and 128GB BD-R disks didn't come down in price. Now they never will.

Yah I would have liked to move up to BDR, never came across a drive for a price I liked when I was spending money though, and the media prices were never tempting. I didn't even find dual layer DVD-R for a reasonable price for a reasonable brand.

I would have gotten a Blu-ray writer as well had they come down in price along with their media but they never approached CD-R and DVD-R prices. It really is too bad that Sony won the war.