Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s.

You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user.

A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.

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adrian_b 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That is easy for optical drives, because there is no direct relationship between the size of bits on the optical track and the dimensions of the read/write laser head.

For magnetic media, the gaps in the magnetic circuit of the read/write heads are optimized for a certain dimension of the bits from the tape material and the efficiency of the read/write process greatly diminishes for other bit sizes.

So there is no obsolescence policy, but there is a real technical difficulty in ensuring compatibility with older magnetic media with different bit densities.

	▲	AshamedCaptain 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is not that simple. There is a relationship between laser and media, most optical drives to this day have entirely separate lasers for different generations of media. At the very least, red vs blue lasers. It is not as simple as claiming that optical drives have it easier technologically. If anything, I would claim that tapes have it simpler, definitely for reading at least. There is _nothing_ preventing LTO from retrocompatibility other than market forces.