Magnetic tape data storage
From ECDL.web
Magnetic tape has been used for data storage for over 50 years. In this time, many advances in tape formulation, packaging, and data density have been made. Modern magnetic tape is most commonly packaged in cartridges and cassettes. The device that performs actual writing or reading of data is a tape drive. Autoloaders and tape libraries are frequently used to automate cartridge handling.
Initially, magnetic tape for data storage was wound on large (10.5 in/26.67 cm) reels. This defacto standard for large computer systems persisted through the late 1980s. Tape cartridges and cassettes were available as early as the mid 1970s and were frequently used with small computer systems. With the introduction of the IBM 3480 cartridge in 1984, large computer systems started to move away from open reel tapes and towards cartridges.
In the context of magnetic tape, the term cassette usually refers to an enclosure that holds two reels with a single span of magnetic tape. The term cartridge is more generic, but frequently means a single reel of tape in a plastic enclosure. The type of packaging is a large determinant of the load and unload times as well as the length of tape that can be held. A tape drive that uses a single reel cartridge has a takeup reel in the drive while cassettes have the take up reel in the cassette. A tape drive (or "transport" or "deck") uses precisely-controlled motors to wind the tape from one reel to the other, passing a read/write head as it does.
In the 1970s and 1980s, audio Compact Cassettes were frequently used as an inexpensive data storage system for home computers. Compact cassettes were logically, as well as physically, sequential; they had to be rewound and read from the start to load data. Early cartridges were available before personal computers had affordable disk drives, and could be used as random access devices, automatically winding and positioning the tape, albeit with access times of many seconds. Most modern magnetic tape systems use reels that are fixed inside a cartridge to protect the tape and facilitate handling. Modern cartridge formats include DAT/DDS, DLT and LTO with capacities in the tens to hundreds of gigabytes.
[edit] Tape drive
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. It is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability. A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a disk drive, which provides random access storage. A disk drive can move its read/write head(s) to any random part of the disk in a very short amount of time, but a tape drive must spend a considerable amount of time winding tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very slow average seek times. Despite the slow seek time, tape drives can stream data to and from tape very quickly. For example, popular Linear Tape-Open (LTO) drives can reach, as of 2010, continuous data transfer rates of up to 140 MB/s, which is comparable to hard disk drives.