A tape drive is a statistics garage tape storage device that reads and writes records on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape records garage is normally used for offline, archival information storage. Tape media generally has a positive unit cost and a long archival stability. A tape drive provides sequential access storage, in contrast to a difficult disk drive, which presents direct get right of entry to garage. A disk power can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive should physically wind tape among reels to examine anyone precise piece of statistics. As a result, tape drives have very huge average get entry to instances. However, tape drives can flow information right away off a tape when the desired position has been reached.

For instance, as of 2017 linear tape-open (lto) supports non-stop statistics transfer quotes of as much as 360 mb/s, a price comparable to tough disk drives. Magnetic tape drives with capacities of much less than one megabyte were first used for statistics garage on mainframe computer systems inside the fifties. As of 2018, capacities of 20 terabytes or better of uncompressed information according to cartridge were to be had. In early pc structures, magnetic tape served as the principle garage medium due to the fact even though the drives were expensive,

the tapes had been cheaper. Some computer systems ran the operating system on tape drives inclusive of dectape. Dectape had fixed-size indexed blocks that could be rewritten without demanding different blocks, so dectape can be used like a gradual disk drive. Records tape drives may also use superior information integrity strategies inclusive of multilevel forward error correction, shingling, and linear serpentine format for writing records to tape.

Tape drives may be related to a computer with scsi, fibre channel, sata, usb, firewire, ficon, or different interfaces. tape drives are used with autoloaders and tape libraries which mechanically load, dump, and save multiple tapes, increasing the extent of statistics which may be stored with out guide intervention. Within the early days of home computing, floppy and tough disk drives have been very luxurious.

Many computer systems had an interface to store statistics thru an audio tape recorder, commonly on compact cassettes. Easy committed tape drives, which include the expert dectape and the home zx microdrive and rotronics wafadrive, had been also designed for inexpensive information storage. However, the drop in disk force expenses made such options obsolete. Statistics compression

as some information may be compressed to a smaller length than the authentic files, it has turn out to be not unusual when advertising tape drives to country the capacity with the assumption of a The true storage potential is likewise known as the local capacity or the raw capacity. The compression ratio sincerely manageable depends on the statistics being compressed. A few statistics has little redundancy view more