What use are tape drives nowadays?

[JKS]

Hopefully I posted this in the right forum. I ask this question because of all the more convenient storage media we have today: zip disks, memory sticks, USB pen drives, external media drives, network backup, DVD/CD burning hardware. Tape drives need to be accessed in a sequential read, all of this modern storage media can be accessed using random reads. The only use of tape storage media I can understand is if somebody has some tape backups they made years ago and they need to get at the data on them.

 

[uzi9mm]

Some Tape media hold like 50gb, also they have a higher tolerance for re-use, you can write, erase, write, erase the data many times before the media fails.

 

[TheHeadFL]

Tape drives are primarily used in enterprise environments.

Where I used to work, for instance, you could load a tape drive in the servers with maybe 14 different tapes. The tape drive was an autoloader, so it could automatically record to different internal tapes depending on what day of the week it was. You just change the cartridge once a week.

 

[CJJohnson]

Reliability, size and cost. They can store a great deal of data and used in a business they can be automated. Newer and faster technology is replacing them

For a home environment it is probably quickest and quite cheap to have a USB HDD to backup your C: onto and putting important files onto DVD-r etc.

It also depends upon the tape drive. I have a parallel port tape drive, Windows XP no longer supports P Port tape drives