When “big Tape” Stops Being a Storage Asset and Starts Acting Like Radioactive Data Waste

A single 100 TB tape holding hundreds of millions of small files isn’t a marvel — it’s a liability. Sequential media can’t handle that object density safely. The fix: treat tape like a distributed object store. Add erasure coding on-tape and across tapes (RAIT), spread data intelligently, and demand smarter metadata from library vendors. Tape’s future depends on evolving from “big spool of bits” to “resilient coded archive.”