In the era of big data, many companies depend on data for their survival, so data is a critical asset that must be protected as best as possible. Various backup strategies were adopted which included the use of disk drives, cloud storage, and even tape drives.
What are tape drives? And why do tape drives still exist today even though the capabilities of disk drives and cloud storage are clearly superior?
Know What is a Tape Drive
Tape drives are magnetic tape-based data storage media. Tape drives have been abandoned because the data retrieval method uses the sequential access method, which is much slower than disk drives.
Sequential access itself is a data retrieval method that is carried out in accordance with the order of data in the storage tape. To obtain the desired data, the tape must be rolled forward or backward until the location of the data is found.
Sequential access is the simplest method of data access and much slower than the direct access method implemented by disk drives such as hard disks and optical drives. Direct access allows the hard disk to directly access data wherever it is located.
Although hard drives and cloud storage are superior in terms of speed, there are still many companies that use tape drives for file archiving or backup purposes.
One of the reasons is the more economical price factor. Tape drives are the cheapest big data storage solution ever. There are several parties who dispute this claim because they take into account hidden costs such as maintenance costs and the like, but still it cannot be denied that tape drives are indeed cheaper when viewed only from the price.
Know What is a Tape Drive
Regarding the hidden costs in question, actually hard disks also have their own shortcomings that make the overall cost of ownership swell.
For example, the average hard disk lifespan is relatively shorter than the tape drive lifespan. The age of the hard disk does depend on several factors, but in general the age of the hard disk is between 4-5 years. That is if the hard disk is used properly. Meanwhile, tape drives, provided that they are stored properly, can last up to about 30 years.
Tape drives can also be more reliable in writing data because of their lower unrecoverable bit error rate than hard disks. This error occurs when a media is supposed to write a 1 but instead writes a 0 — or vice versa — and the error is not corrected, resulting in corrupted data.
Tape drive technology is still being developed, so don't be surprised if there is a tape drive with a storage capacity of hundreds of terabytes. The transfer speed is also better than before.