I get email alerts from ebay for anything related to LTO-5, and I only buy the cheap used tapes. They are still fine, most of them are very low use, the tapes actually have a chip in them that stores usage data like a car's odometer, so you can know how much a tape has been used. So far I trust tapes more than I'd trust a refurb hard drive for backups. And I also really like that the tapes have a write-protect notch on them, so once I write my backup data, there's no risk of having a tape accidentally get erased, unlike if I plugged in a hard drive and maybe there's some ransomware virus that automatically fucks with any hard drive drive that gets plugged in. It's just one less thing to worry about.
