Magnetic Tape Storage: Far From a Relic
Magnetic tape storage today seems like a relic of a bygone age. Cassette players have long since been replaced by iPods and the like. VHS tapes have been superseded by DVD and Blu-Ray disks (although one VHS player manufacturer stayed in the game until 2016). Tape drives were great for high-capacity data storage in the 80s and 90s (although hard drives were much faster). But eventually, hard drives overtook tape drives in the consumer market. Is there any use for this quaint, old piece of data storage technology?
As a matter of fact, there is. Magnetic tape still sees use on a scale that may seem surprising. Tape drives are more rugged and durable than hard drives. Try dropping a VHS tape (if you can find one) and a hard drive from the same height and see which one survives! (Note: make sure anything important on the drive was backed up first.) And as scale increases, the cost per-gigabyte of tape storage actually falls below that of disk storage. Creating a storage array in the range of dozens or thousands or millions of terabytes of data out of hard drives is completely, utterly unfeasible. But not if you make it out of tape drives.
Tape libraries today see use as the ultimate in archival data storage and backup. It is possible for a tape library to hold over an exabyte (one million terabytes) of data. While data access is extremely slow, tape drives in these libraries have a much longer life than hard drives, ensuring access to their data decades or even centuries into the future. Tape libraries of varying sizes can still be found in any organization that needs data retrievable for a long time in the future. These types of data storage are referred to as “nearline storage”.
Consult Our Advisers for Tape Storage Data Recovery
At Gillware, we don’t see tape-based and tape-associated storage devices very often. But when we do, we are very good at salvaging the data off of them. If you have any Tandberg RDX Quikstor data recovery needs, contact one of our recovery client advisers to set up a case with us.