Tape sucks unless you've got massive amounts of money to burn. Not only are tape drives expensive, they only read the last two tape generations. It's entirely possible to end up in a future where your tapes are unreadable.

There's a lot of LTO drives around. I strongly doubt there will be any point in the reasonable lifetime of LTO tapes (let's say 30 years) where you wouldn't be able to get a correct-generation drive pretty easily.