A tape drive or streamer is a component that is often attached to a computer. It is used to write data to magnetic tape or to read data from it. Usually people use it to do backups. Tape drives are different from hard drives in that the access to the data is sequential (in order). This means to read a certain part of data, all the data before it needs to be read as well. Also tape drives are slow, compared to hard drives. Current mainstream tape drives, utilizing Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, offer native (uncompressed) capacities ranging from 400 GB up to 18 TB per cartridge, with compressed capacities reaching up to 45 TB.
- ↑ "Capacity of supported LTO tape cartridges". www.ibm.com. Retrieved 2026-08-19.