Tape Drives for $2k?

My hardware people recomend switching to a HP LTO2 tape drive for backups. I looked at their qoute, and I nearly fell off my chair. They were asking almost $2,000 just for the drive! Holy poop on a stick!

I was so shocked I actually went to HP website to verify the pricing. And yeah, it is within the ballpark. This is crazy! Absolutely in-fucking-sane. I can get a semi-decent, brand new desktop for that price! WTF! I can't understand why would these things be so damn expensive!

Why don't I just buy 5 250GB firewire drives for half the price of that drive, and use them to image my disk every day of the week?

I just don't see my boss signing off on a $2k tape drive order...

Tags: wtf moment, tape drive, hp, lto2, work, it, hardware, backups