Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory... basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... t…
If we take any portable media as the comparison, the largest I know of is 50GB for a blueray disk, that’s still something you can ‘almost’ load into 32gb of memory (if your OS and Teams app didn’t take 16gb of course).
Luckily, the gen 7 tapes are 10-100 times that large, depending on who you ask. Each disk costs approximately $2-$5 as well, assuming you get some sort of discount. Tapes are more, they hold more, but at a certain point having a disc in a jewel case is better than having some tape. bluray drives are easy to find, tape readers, not so much.