Talk:Tape drive
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Not trolling, but where I live, tape drives are considered obsolete. Everyone here believes that hard disk drives replaced tape drives in the 90s. Recently I foud an article on Slashdot, about some new achievements in the field of tape storage, and then I went on Wikipedia to read about tape drives.
So someone, please let me know: what is the current status of tape drives? Whos is still using them? Are tape drives mainstream again?
Thank you.
- I'd say that the biggest place tape drives are used is for backup. BioTube 23:00, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Tape drives have always been main stream, its just people who use PC's don't bother to back things up. The whole point of a tape drive is that it give you a removable and robust storage. Hard disk does not. It might be removable but it is definatly not robust. If you have 1 Tb of data that needs backing up, how are you going to do this on to a hard disk?
Nick.
- Easy, use a 1 TB USB drive. Canadacow 20:21, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Merger
Hi. It seems that Shoe-shining Effect is nothing but the definition of a term that relates only to tape drives. I propose the information on that page be merged into this article. - Jorbettis 07:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
- I agree! -- Austin Murphy 03:37, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Tape drives are still an alternative for archiving data in larger data centers. Simply to save power and money. With tape drives reaching 800 GB native capacity today (LTO4), at a media price less then half of a disk drive it is ideal for data which is not expected to be used often (i.e. backups, or archived data). In addition software solutions exist, which let you have some files 'offline' on tape, while others are 'online' on disk. Studies show that we use only 20% of the files on our disk drives, so why not moving those other 80% to tape?
The reason why tape drives are not used so often anymore, is that they are costly if not used for large amounts of data (>30 TB). For small amounts of data, disk drives are cheaper. Check out this site for current tape technology: www.lto.org. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.60.165.233 (talk) 14:06, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Advancements TODO
Which vendor and when introduced:
- Streaming mode instead of start-stop. Elimination of vacuum columns. Elimination of long empty Inter-Record Gaps 1979 IBM 8809
- Tape directory: IBM patented '93 as DBM, exact model tbd [1]. Archive QIC [2]? Travan TR-1?
- fast data access of tape directory: Quantum [3]?
- double coated media: Quantum?
- symmetric phase recording: Quantum?
- Head assembly servo following tape optical pre-recorded servo tracks [4] (SDLT?)
- "Cleaning needed" indicator: 3590 [5]?
- Automatic head cleaning on each load (LTO?)
- Tape cartridge barcodes: IBM 3590 [6]?
- Speed matching (to decrease shoe-shining) (LTO2?)
- WORM tape (T9940? AIT-2 in 1999?)
- Memory chip in the cartridge that keeps relevant information about the tape (AIT-1?)
- With remote access (AIT-2 in 1999?)
- Amplifier in the rotating drum, close to the head to reduce noise (active drum) (AIT-2 in 1999?)
- Tape media (possibly a separate article at some point, several variations of each type exist):
- Vicalloy - UNISERVO
- (Iron) Oxide
- CrO2 Cromium Dioxide
- MP Metal Partical
- AME Advance Metal Evaporated (Exabyte Mammoth? AIT-1 in 1996?)
- AMP Advanced Metal Powder [7]
- ...
- (native) Capacity milestones
- 100 MB -
- 1 GB -
- 10 GB -
- 100 GB -
- 400 GB
- 1 TB - not yet (working on it, its in the oven and will be in market soon)
