Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Did I ever tell you that my first job at my current employer was managing our tape product lines?  People didn't believe me then, and don't believe me now, when I tell them that tape still not only exists but thrives.

What do you  mean by tape?  I mean we had data tapes in the 70's/80's, but I really don't recall much being on tape past the 90's.  

As a proud member square in Gen X I have very fond memories of the 8-bit computing era, I would love to  know more.  

What do you  mean by tape?  I mean we had data tapes in the 70's/80's, but I really don't recall much being on tape past the 90's. 

As a proud member square in Gen X I have very fond memories of the 8-bit computing era, I would love to  know more. 

Yep, as @utee94 states tape is a mass archival storage technology that is still quite a large market. 

It's not like the days of my Commodore 64 when I was 5 years old that had a cassette tape storage devices. These are massive libraries:




Tape has an advantage over HDD or flash because when it's not being accessed, it consumes zero power, and they're significantly less expensive on a $/TB basis. It's also cheaper from a system perspective because you basically have only a few tape "drives" that can read the data, whereas other storage interfaces you need an individual interface for each storage device that is attached.

Of course, tape has a disadvantage of latency of minutes to hours (or potentially days depending on priority and other data needing to be accessed) to get your data... As opposed to milliseconds to seconds. Which is why it's primarily used for archive, backup, etc that you can accept a long latency for access. 

Yep, as @utee94 states tape is a mass archival storage technology that is still quite a large market.

It's not like the days of my Commodore 64 when I was 5 years old that had a cassette tape storage devices. These are massive libraries:




Tape has an advantage over HDD or flash because when it's not being accessed, it consumes zero power, and they're significantly less expensive on a $/TB basis. It's also cheaper from a system perspective because you basically have only a few tape "drives" that can read the data, whereas other storage interfaces you need an individual interface for each storage device that is attached.

Of course, tape has a disadvantage of latency of minutes to hours (or potentially days depending on priority and other data needing to be accessed) to get your data... As opposed to milliseconds to seconds. Which is why it's primarily used for archive, backup, etc that you can accept a long latency for access.

Ah, the old C=64.  I had one in the 4th grade, about 1986.  I never had the dasette, but I did have the 1541 Disk Drive with the 5-1/4" floppy disks.  

I've used paper tape storage for real in the past, and of course the old 029 IBM card punch machines.

As @betarhoalphadelta mentioned, tape uses less energy than spinning drives or flash, so one could say it is more environmentally friendly.

Of course, there are no systems in the world that are tape-only.  It's used as backup/archive for data that previously existed on HDD or SSD.

do tapes cause global warming

why discuss here

oh wait nobody cares

Actually, you'd be amazed at how much the people in massive datacenter and cloud computing companies care. 

I can't really get into specifics, but I can say that the biggest datacenter customers in the world are not just "blowing smoke" as it were about sustainability.

One in particular has made a public target to be carbon-negative by 2030 by using carbon capture technologies in excess of their own emissions, and via carbon capture to take all the carbon they've caused to be emitted since their founding in 1975 out of the atmosphere:

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/

So to an extent, tape IS one of the strategies the world uses and will continue to use to store data with less environmental impact than certain other technologies. 

THIS DAY IN HISTORY:

Dust Bowl: Dust Storm Hits Great Plains (1934)
In the 1930s, severe drought conditions in the Great Plains region of the US and decades of farming without crop rotation led to a series of devastating dust storms. The storms, called "dusters" or "black blizzards," caused widespread ecological and agricultural damage. In May 1934, one of the worst storms to hit the Dust Bowl blew massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil all the way to the East Coast

That was some sad sorry times and with locusts eating up parts of the west no roots to hold down the soil. One could see the biblical connotations