The lto 5 drives are around $400 on ebay and the tapes can be had for around $20 each - less if bought in bulk and each tape hold 1.5TB.
I don't find it that slow as in the event of a restore like i am doing at the moment, I can get through around 3 tapes per 24 hours.
One thing I will say is although newer LTO standards allow you to treat it like a normal drive it works better using proper software designed for the task like Iperius Backup.
I am trying to get my wife to learn more about Linux. She likes Bread on Penguins but sadly can't get her into DT, The Linux Experiment or even Gardiner. Therefore, I thought if i could find more female voices talking about Linux it may be more accessible for her.
If you have a bigger budget around $2k something like LTO7 with 6TB tapes would be fantastic for larger data sets.