A tape drive is a data storage device that uses magnetic tape as a medium for recording and storing data. Originally developed in the 1950s, tape drives have traditionally been used for data backup, archiving, and data transfer due to their high capacity and relatively low cost per gigabyte, especially in large-scale environments.
One of the most enduring forms of storage! Started in the 1950s, but still used in the 2020s as the cheapest (and slowest access) archival method. Robot arms are needed to load and read them nowadays.
Web camera mounted insite an IBM TS4500 tape library by lkaptoor (2020)
Source. Footage dated 2018. New to topics? Read the docs here!