My experience with low cost tape drives has been dismal. They are charter subscribers to Murphy's law and always fail when most needed. As a result I have lost all objectivity on that subject. I have been using a parallel port ZIP drive since they first came out. I use it mostly to move data between computers.
All computers have identical parallel ports so that connecting the drive is never a problem.
It behaves like just another drive on any computer. It takes about a minute to connect the cable and load the necessary software. My 100-Meg ZIP drive has worked flawlessly. There is also an internal ZIP model drive which is supplied as standard on several new computers, in addition to the 1.44 Meg floppy. I believe that at this juncture, a better system might be the one put out by SyQuest.