What is the difference between tape and disk storage

For example, saw the shipment of more than 1 million petabytes in LTO tape capacity — roughly five times what was shipped in At the same time, the tapeless backup and recovery system has become the norm. Every backup expert that I know recommends disk as the primary target for backup and recovery.

How then to explain the increase in the amount of tape being shipped? The answer might be surprising, but first let's take a look at what tape is good at — and not so good at. Even with all the advancements in deduplication — which is primarily used on disk — tape is still cheaper per gigabyte than tape for a few reasons.

Not only is this time consuming, but it becomes a security issue because someone could take it and never return it or lose it. Disk systems are automatic — they can be replicated offsite, in a secure location. Tape backup vs. The newness of disk systems made it risky, plus tape backup was already proven to reliably get the job done. Today, the decision is simple. Disk backup makes more logical sense in terms of cost, storage capacity, speed and usability.

Skip to content Search Marco. Technology Insights Blog. Tape Backup vs. By: Clay Ostlund May 19, Magnetic tape media are optimal for storing data safely for a long time. Magnetic tape systems have low risks of data loss due to blackouts, crashes, or virus attacks, etc. Tape media, which can store data offline and are portable, are suitable for remote data storage to protect important data from disasters and other risks.

However, tape storage today has a lower failure rate and lower risks of data loss caused by blackouts, crashes, or virus attacks, etc. Tape storage is a highly reliable storage system. In contrast, since the transfer rate of tape systems does not change during recording verification, they can record twice as fast as other storage systems.

This chart shows the time required for one drive to read a single file. For tape and optical disk storage systems, it is assumed that time is needed to load media into the drive and access the desired data. Idle for random access. Access Slower in data accessing. Fast in data accessing. Update Once data is fed, it can't be updated. Data can be updated. Data loss If the tape is damaged, the data is lost. In a case of a head crash, the data is lost. From Several hundred GB to Terabytes.

Expense Magnetic tapes are less expensive. Magnetic disk is more expensive. Magnetic Tapes were introduced in , earlier used as a secondary storage medium. Magnetic tape is a thin long narrow plastic strip coated with the magnetizable substance.

The tape is wounded over a spool, and it is wounded or unwounded past a read-write head to read from or write data to the tape. Magnetic Tapes are nonvolatile in nature and hence it holds the large quantity of data permanently.