I'm incredibly unqualified to even think about how one might get faster random access times but i was imagining sci-fi solutions like looped tape so that you are always at most 1/2 of the tape length away from the point you want to reach, or the tape equivalent of multi actuator hard drives where there's be multiple independent tapes in one cassette in a sort of RAID style thing but maybe instead of (only) striping data could be stored on multiple tapes in different places to always have one tape that is at a position close to the data you want. Or a system where the same tape has multiple read heads applied to it in distant places.
I'm aware of the enterprise backup solutions as mentioned in the main post. Still 45 TB are very impressive. But I was just wondering how diverse and powerful tape could be if it was the only viable storage solution. I'm assuming high speed rewinding and seeking and miniaturization would be something that the industry would have put a lot of effort into in that case, but for backup solutions those properties are less important.
That's of course true, i was just wondering how far we could push it.