It helps that those tapes can be read in the future easily as well. HP at one point asked the company I worked for at the time if they could use their tape copy program with their new drives so that customers could copy older DAT tapes to a newer version so they didn't have to support older media formats in their newer drives.

The newer media is typically on a new very fast tape drive and sometimes it is difficult to saturate those anyway and keep stopping and starting and having to reposition over and over.