Re: Speed?
No, because "uses" as you put it is 200 times to fill up a tape which for LTO-5 according to Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open requires "80 end to end passes to fill up a tape" and so your ACTUAL TOTAL "Expected tape durability, end-to-end passes" is 16000 (80 times 200) and not the 200 you quoted.
However, since the total size is 1.5TB this implies you could read 18.75 GB for one pass (1.5 TB / 80) so say for the entire data access operation you want to read just one (and only one) file (e.g. a movie) even up to this 18.75 GB size it could conceivably be contained on one pass but realistically most likely would be split over two and so you could quite comfortably do this procedure about 8000 times. Anything much smaller would most likely be readable with one pass only and of course I'm presuming the data on the tapes would be contiguous but that would be a reasonable assumption to make as the backup software would most likely be writing the files sequentially. Naturally I'd make a further assumption that each of the 4 bands and the 20 wraps per band get roughly the same amount of access because otherwise yes each individual wrap might only be good for 200 passes before the tape is worn out in that spot and the drive/software offlines the cartridge permanently due to "too many hardware errors" or whatever.
Tape drives themselves have a MTBF of 250K - 1M hours or so and their tape load/unload cycles are also huge so I don't see them failing early for this reason either, but who knows the tape holding the header pin might snap off after say 1000? load/unload cycles but since its reinforced around that area then 8000-16000 cycles of single file accesses <= 18.75GB in size might still be quite reasonable for one tape cartridge.
That's my 2 cents worth but someone more knowledgeable who actually uses LTO extensively may have a different opinion.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
