![]() ![]() Of course it's worth noting that they currently have no real technical advantage over hard drive backups, other than being compatible with older systems. Their niche today is generally backups for large multinational enterprises. ![]() It might seem weird, but the tape drive is not exactly extinct as a storage medium, and modern ones as of June 2018 can store up to 12 TB of data, or up to 30 TB if hardware compression is employed. In the 1990s the films Clear and Present Danger and Eraser featured StorageTek PowderHorn robotic tape "silos". Interestingly, although the use of audio cassettes for data storage on home computers was quite common in the late 70s and early 80s, no one ever mistook a tape deck for a CPU box. In modern works, this trope shows up only in period pieces set before approximately 1975, or when dealing with technology built before then. Most have moved on to modern tape cartridge drives, which have a capacity of up to 12 terabytes. note It's impractical to use because of extremely slow random access, not because of low capacity and high cost. They're not kidding about the size ether, in Windows, right-clicking on a drive and clicking on properties on one of these will inform you that, coming from the factory, formatted, the drive has "4,000,412,387,568 bytes free." That means data storage on modern hardware is thousands of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation. As of December 2019, that 4 trillion-byte external hard drive is now available as made to military standards to survive a 4-foot drop and still work flawlessly, and costs $120. note And the price has gotten even cheaper. A top-of-the-line 4 terabyte note that's 4 trillion bytes hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200. And that's not even the cheapest example. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. A 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, a little over 100 megabytes of data, note the normal maximum block size is 32760 bytes, and each 32760-byte block takes, with the gap following it, 5.992 inches and costs about US$12. No longer as common, since in Real Life, almost everybody note except certain industrial class backup systems has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost. When a Tape Drive is operating, there is obviously something going on - just look at the spinning reels! (This was also, it must be remembered, the era before monitors and graphical user interfaces were common, so computational results generally had to come from a printout.) This was primarily done because the computer itself is very visually uninteresting when in operation. Most viewers were left with the impression that the tape drive was the computer. They usually had banks of blinking lights as well. In older movies and TV shows, made before the invention of the personal computer, all computers had large nine-track reel-to-reel magnetic tape drives, which were always moving back and forth. ![]()
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