tape drive

A shoebox sat beside the tape drive, filled with dozens of these cassettes.

They face worries current storage options—primarily tape drives—will at some point stop reliably retaining data, or that hardware to read aging storage formats will become unavailable.

Lots of old tape drives are rugged and effective.

The earlier project involved 1,500 magnetic tapes and a couple of old, broken tape drives.

Due to its use of storage tiering Elastic Storage automatically moves infrequently used data to less expensive low cost tape drives while storing more frequently used data on high-speed flash memory.