Also known as: tape, LTO
Magnetic tape stores data on a long, thin ribbon of magnetic film wound on reels, written and read sequentially by a tape drive.1
Overview
A drive pulls the tape past a head that magnetises regions to record bits, much like a hard disk drive but on flexible media that must be streamed end to end rather than seeked. The dominant modern format is LTO (Linear Tape-Open), whose cartridges now hold many terabytes each and improve with every generation. Because there are no fast random-access mechanics, the medium itself is extremely cheap, and a tape sitting on a shelf consumes no power and keeps data for decades.
Where it fits
Tape lives at the coldest, deepest end of the memory hierarchy: the slowest access but the lowest cost per terabyte and the longest shelf life, which is exactly what large-scale backup and archival want. Data centres still move petabytes onto LTO for “cold storage.” Its sequential nature suits write-once-read-rarely archives — a fitting place to retire years of GopherTrunk IQ captures that you want to keep but rarely touch, while live decoding stays on SSD or disk.
Sources
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Magnetic tape data storage — Wikipedia, on tape storage, LTO, and its role in archival. ↩