And tape has (historically at least; I haven't check in for a few years) been faster at purely streaming loads than spinning rust. Pre SSDs, there'd be systems that streamed to tape to keep up with input data, then would offline load that into spinning rust databases to crank numbers where seeking dominated.
Yup. A well-known issue with tape is that machines have a hard time supplying it with data fast enough to keep up with its linear travel speed when creating the backups.
Yup. I did some tests and my SSD (and even HDD) can handily keep up with the data rate. If not, I can always add a small staging drive the size of a tape to pre-prepare the data for writing.
