Hello Vladimir,
we discussed about this today at the CTA operations meeting and we will continue the discussion on Friday at the CTA development meeting.
LBP support was added to CASTOR (CTA predecessor) tapeserverd (now cta-taped) in 2016 (following investigation in 2014). I was able to find the discussion here (not sure you have access to it):
https://its.cern.ch/jira/browse/CASTOR-5279
Only CRC32 algorithm was implemented because it has a hardware support in CPU so there is no performance hit when using it.
We assumed that from that moment on, all drives will support it (there is a function that checks whether LBP is supported by the drive but not which algorithm). We did not consider implementing something backwards compatible.
That does not mean that it can not be done.
Would you be willing to contribute to implement an option in /etc/cta/cta-taped.conf file (deployed on every tape server) there LBP could be enabled or disabled? This would then be taken into account by the cta-taped as well as cta-tape-label.
Let us know what you think, as I stated above, we will re-discuss this again on Friday.
Vladimir
PS: Here another discussion about LBP : Problems reading Enstore tapes - #9 by ewv