I would be very curious to hear what type of reliability problems you have
seen with LTO.  I have posted here before, but we have been experiencing
an incredibly high number of read errors with our 3584 LTO library.  We
regularly see errors when trying to restore data from tapes.  We have been
auditing volumes recently and have seen errors on a tape during one audit,
and then audit again, with no errors.  There is no discernable pattern to
these errors (across multiple tapes and multiple drives).  Due to the
nature of the data we are backing up, the data does not change often (and
therefore the tapes are generally written to once, and the data stays
there), so over-used tapes should not be an issue.

I can name without much thinking 5 to 6 customers with either a 3583 or
3584 with lots of errors on tapes. For the 3583 this is due to the quality
of the library.
For the 3584 we got better since microcode 25D4 is installed on the (fc)
drives. The library we keep on fw 2460. Since that time we saw that the IBM
engineers did not have to come every week onsite to replace drives where
stuck tapes were locked inside.

We also found out it is not a matter of tapebrands, the IBM or the Imation
give an equal amout of errors.

I think it can only solved by keep checking and doing audits on volumes, in
some envrioment we even moved the data of the tape and removed that
tapecartridge.

Another thing about reliability is the internal storwatch specialist which
is running, or not, oh yes it works,, no it does not.... Even setting
everything to 10mbit half duplex did not solve this issue.

I would move the data from tape to tape every year to avoid tapeproblems.

good luck

Peter