Why Tape Drives Are Best for Archiving

Tape drives are a form of data storage that utilize sequential reading and writing to store and recover data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is ordinarily reserved for offsite, archival use. Tape media ordinarily has an excellent unit cost and extended archival stability over time.

A tape drive uses sequential access, unlike a disk drive, which uses random access. A drive head on a disk drive can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive can only move in a linear fashion across the surface of the tape, requiring much more time to access a datum that is in a different location. It is the same as DVD and VHS technology. DVDs can be used to access a certain scene or time of the movie almost instantaneously, but significantly more time must be taken to wind a VHS tape to a desired time.

Tape drives can improve a SAN backup infrastructure and are worthy of some research for the right type of business. The technology effectively reserves the role of backup server for itself, leaving the primary servers free from the burden. Backups not regularly being accessed, the slow accessibility for specific data does not pose an inconvenience. If a server goes down or data is lost, an entire server image can be loaded from the tape drive in a reasonable amount of time, as it will use sequential access to read data stored as such.

For networks of any size, data backup solutions are invaluable. Tape drives are an interesting retrograde solution becoming popular in today’s market. Mainstream hardware companies are now offering tape drives for all scenarios, like Dell data storage options, which offer products ranging from small businesses to transnational corporations.