Any experience with entry-level tapes as an archiving media?

I am trying to find out whether DAT72 and AIT-1 tape drives are really
suitable for long-term archiving beside current backups (for which much
cheaper solutions could be found). No special reliability requirements,
just the convenience of having a single piece of hardware that would fit
both purposes for several years to come.

First of all, there are horror stories about head misalignment that we
all know - but was there any significant evidence after the failures of
DDS2 in 1990s? 

The state of tape archiving programs on OS/2 is another question. Will
the GTAK tape utility accept pipe input beyond 2 gigabytes? Is the
current port of GNU tar 2G-safe? In theory, there shouldn't be much
concern with tar pipe output exceeding 2 gigs as long as individual
files are less than 2G (they are) but still I'd give more credence to
actual experience.

Finally, if DAT72 is to be avoided like plague, it would be particularly
interesting to see any comments on the recent AIT-1 Turbo drives. Sony
claims unit prices to be comparable with DAT72 (both start from $560
here, but at this point all AIT drives are ATAPI while DAT72 drives are
SCSI). OTOH, media costs are exorbitant for AIT: with $40 a tape (and
that's for a MICless variety!) I'll feel happy playing Hanoi Towers with
DVD+RW media and backing up to some consumer-grade HDD-based solution.




 
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