What is Tape?

Magnetic tape is a thin, magnetizable medium used for recording and storing data. It is typically wound onto reels or cassettes. While largely superseded by newer technologies like hard drives and solid-state drives for primary data storage, magnetic tape remains widely used for archiving and backups due to its high storage capacity, low cost per gigabyte, and long archival life. Tape drives are used to read and write data to the tape.