Why magnetic tape is still being used today!

Hello Readers,

If you are younger than twenty you may be scratching your head and wondering what magnetic tape is. Magnetic tape is "a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film" Quote Source.

Some real world examples that you may remember are:

• Cassette
  
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• VHS
  
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• Reel to Reel
  
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These examples may make you think that this concept of storing data on magnetic tape is dead. We have hard disk drive's that can store terabytes of data and solid state storage that is smaller than your thumbnail. Why would we continue to mess with magnetic tape?

The answer is storing a large amount of data for a long period of time. This is accomplished with Tape Drives. The specific standard is LTO (Linear Tape-Open) and the form factor is called Ultrium.

Here's what it looks like:

Image Source before I notated it.
Some of it's features from left to right:

• Write protection flap can be opened or shut to prevent the tape from being overwritten.
• The barcode is used to identify the tape.
• The indentions are where the picker (little arms) of the robot in a tape library can reach out and grab the tape.
• This is where the tape is unspooled from when the tape drive needs to read from or write to the tape.

Speaking of tape drives, let's take a look at what you put the tape into.
Here's a picture of one:

Source
Here's a good video at the relevant time that shows the inner workings of the drive, you can stop after 30 seconds.

How much data can you really write to this tape and how fast can you write it? Check out this table from the Wikipedia page:

Yes, you are reading that right. You can store 12 Terabytes of data on an LTO 8 tape. And that's uncompressed. If your data is extremely compressible and you reach the 2.5 max ration then you can store up to 30TB of data. The write speed is also impressive at 360 MB/s uncompressed and 750 MB/s compressed. Source for numbers.

I mentioned earlier that the other benefit of tape is storing data for a long period of time. As long as the cartridge is stored in the proper environments it can be used up to 30 years later! Source.

Who would need to keep data for multiple years? The perfect example is anyone who is responsible for following HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) best practices. This is a US Law that affects healthcare providers in multiple ways. The part we are concerned with is the current requirement to retain data for six years! Source. And there are hefty penalties for those who are found not to be in compliance.

Where do you store a tape to make sure it's safe for 30 years? Inside a mountain of course!

Source
Iron Mountain is a company that provides the service of shipping and storing your tapes and other media in secure temperature controlled environments. This is important for companies trying to meet compliance, but also those that would need to recover their data and business information if their primary site were to be hit by some sort of destructive force like a fire, flood, or earthquake.

There's plenty of more detail to go into, but I didn't want to take you to deep on your first dive. I hope you enjoyed reading my post and maybe learned a little something.

This was also my first post using the #steemstem tag so let me know how I did and where I can improve for future posts.

Source List used in post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape
https://www.spectralogic.com/features/lto-8/
https://www.fujifilmusa.com/shared/bin/LTO_Data_Tape_Seminar_2012.pdf
https://datica.com/blog/how-long-to-keep-medical-records-under-hipaa/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_(company)