If you have a USB drive, you can definitely make sure that it has the same drive letter / mount point.

You also don't get rid of your tapes after a couple of months, most modern tapes have a 20-25 year shelf life and you can mount them about 20000 times. Couple of months? Bollocks!

I'm not suggesting that disk isn't the way forward at some point (the robot loading disk carts, that I saw at last years storage expo, are very interesting), but tapes/tape silos don't require air con, they don't gobble power like it's going out of fashion and they are far more resilient to shock, be it Gs or temperature.