A tape is
a magnetically thin coated piece of plastic wrapped around wheels
capable of storing data. Tape is less expensive than other storage mediums, but
it is a much slower solution because it is sequential access and is
often used for backing up large amounts of data.
Today, tape has mostly
been abandoned for faster and more reliable solutions like disc drives, hard
drives, and flash drives that are all direct access and
cloud storage. The image to the right is a picture and example of magnetic tape
taken by KENPEI and shared under the creative commons.
How
much can a tape drive store?
The storage capacity of
a tape drive all depends on the type of tape drive and technology being used.
For example, the first tape drive introduced by Remington Rand in 1951 was
only capable of storing 224 KB of data. Later tape drives released in
the early 2000s were capable of storing several TB of data. For
example, the IBM TS1155 generation 6 tape drive released in 2017 is capable of
storing 15 TB of uncompressed data.
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