I bought a used LTO5 tape drive from ebay, and I've been getting used LTO5 tapes. I've never had a problem. The tape drive lives out in my garage inside my backup server. I have a 10Gbit link so I can write 140MB/s over ethernet from the server inside the house. It works perfectly, has for years, nothing "jams up" (so far). I've had to use a tape drive cleaner cartridge once since I got this thing years ago for routine maintenance. I verify writes for anything important.

Optical just didn't make sense to me. Overall it was way more expensive, and a lot slower to burn BluRay discs.

The max BluRay disc size is 128GB (which is smaller than a lot of SD cards these days), and the fastest you can write to a BluRay disc is 18MB/s. That's a lot of of swapping discs to burn my many Linux distros.

And those 128GB BluRay discs cost between $30 and $40 each. Used tapes (with a lot of life left in them) on ebay are far less expensive per TB - the lowest I've paid is about $1.40/TB for LTO5 tapes without a case. I typically pay about $4/TB for unused LTO5 tapes with a case on ebay. It's getting a bit more difficult to find those deals, but they come up every now and then.