Tape Drive

This is a removable media device mainly used for backing up data. It is similar to a Zip Drive, but it uses little tapes. The drive acts like a tape recorder, reading data from the computer and writing it onto the tape. Since tape drives have to scan through lots of tape just to read small amounts of scattered data, they would be extremely slow for most storage purposes. This is why they are used almost exclusively for data backup. However, tape drives typically have huge capacities for storing data, for a lower cost than hard drives similar in size. They can also transfer data very fast, which is great for backup purposes.