Magnetic tape is used to record sound, pictures, or computer data. It is made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film.
When see this picture, we think of the retro tapes and cassettes that were widely used for data storage before the time of CDs and USBs. It's no surprise that many of us may feel that magnetic tapes are an old school or outdated way to store data compared to modern options available. But the reality is that tape has never gone away.
Much of the world's data is kept on tape, and there are even a cadre of people whose job is to keep improving tape storage. Indeed, magnetic tape storage has continued to advance over the years. When the first commercial tape was introduced by IBM, it could only store about 1.1 megabytes of data. Today, a modern tape can store up to 1 terabytes, and one robotic tape library can contain 278 petabytes of data.
Tapes might have disappeared from consumer-level usage, but it's still being used on an industrial scale. Here's why companies may opt for magnetic tapes over hard disks or #semiconductor memories, and who still uses them:
More energy efficient
More secure - since it isn't mounted on a drive, it can't be accessed or modified.
Lower cost - it costs 1/6 of the amount you'd have to pay to keep the same amount of data on disks, so it's perfect where massive data is stored.
Google's Gmail, despite being a cloud service, uses tapes as backup data storage which allowed them to restore emails they accidentally deleted in 40,000 Gmail accounts in 2011.
Microsoft's Azure Archive Storage uses IBM tape storage equipment.
Liquid filtration is used in the production of magnetic tape coating. GFC Check out our GFC™ Series filter to find out more.