Well, you'll mostly find tape drives/cartridges in large companies - and there'll be plenty there - THOUSANDS!!

Large organizations need ridiculous amounts of storage, so they need a HUGE amount of tapes. Hard Drives, like the ones me and you use at home, are mainly for personal use. We usually just have one, or two.

These large organizations have mainframes and SILO's that manages these tape drives/cartridges so that you can access the data in them quickly. I've recently been told that the monthly maintenance fee for ONE of these SILO's (which can hold about 5,000 cartridges) is about AUD$40,000. That's a whopping amount of cash.

So yeah, I guess basically the HIGH price of these tape drives would come down to reliability. I mean with so much of these things, you'd want to be assured that they are very reliable, cos you wouldn't want any problems with losing data, especially with large organizations, such as banks.

But yeah, even so, the prices are ridiculous. I mean my friend just bought an 80GB hard drive for AUD$230. One of these Imation tape drives/cartridges, which stored 20GB (but had a possibility or storing 80GB when compressed) cost something like AUD$250 or more.

Greg