The storage device known as tape media also goes by the name of tape drive or streamer. It functions as a storage device that reads and writes the data which is stored on a magnetic tape. The primary use of tape media is for the purpose of archival storage of the data that is stored on the hard drive. Tape media is known for its favorable unit cost and the long archival stability that it guarantees.
Tape media is different from a hard disk drive in the way that it allows only sequential access of data whereas a hard disk allows random access to data.
This is because a hard disk drive has the ability to shift its reading and writing heads to any random part on the disk platters. It does this in quick time. On the other hand tape media will take a considerable amount of time because of the winding that takes place between the reels. Eventually you will get to the particular data that you want to read.
The average-seek time for tape media are extremely sluggish. Despite this obvious drawback tape media still has the ability to stream the data to tape in a remarkably quick time. Devices like the latest LTO drives have a continuous data transfer rate of around 80MB/s. This speed is good enough to match a 10000 rpm hard disk.
You will be able to find tape media with different capacities. They can range from a few mega bytes only to hundreds of uncompressed gigabytes. It is important to understand how the tape storage is referred to as in marketing materials. Generally tape media is known to have a 2:1 compression ratio. This means that a tape drive with a capacity noted as 80/160 has an actual storage capacity of 80 which translates as 160 uncompressed.
There are some brands that have used even higher compression ratios such as Sony and IBM. Generally though, the compression ratio that you use is relative to the kind of data that is being compressed. Other terminologies for the actual storage capacity are the raw capacity and the native capacity.
Tape media is most commonly connected to a computer with SCSI. It may also be connected with ESCON, FICON, IDE, USB, SATA, FireWare, Fibre Channel and other interfaces. You will find tape media to be contained within tape libraries as well as the smaller autoloaders. They assist in the loading and unloading process along with the storing of multiple tapes to increase the archive capacity.
The technology for tape media has come a long way since the early days of its innovation. We find that initially some tape media was designed to be an inexpensive alternate to a disk drive. DECtape, Rotronics and Wafadrive are classic examples of such tape media.
Generally though, this is not feasible when using modern tape media. This is because modern tape media uses advanced techniques such as multilevel forward error connection, serpentine layout for the purpose of writing data to tape and shingling.
