Oh I didn’t even think of remote! According to a calculator, 47 hours for 18TiB on a gigabit connection, let’s make it 60 hours: 2½ days. While I can’t plot that much in that little time, the speeds I’m getting would make it worth it (apologies, I know we have it real good here in Europe).
But then, again, we get to: if you’re storing it remote, then just farm it there.
So true! I think mostly the question is: how scared should we be that our “spinning rust” starts failing. From reading in the past few weeks it seems that drives are really very durable and the chance of them failing is a more than acceptable risk in the grand scheme of a farm.
Yep, but I think tape drive seek time might exceed 30 seconds… 
Ah yes, I had to refer to the related topic to brush up again, I wrote farming at first and then doubted myself and changed it.