What is "tape drive"

Drive \Drive\ (dr[imac]v), n.

1. The act of driving; a trip or an excursion in a carriage, as for exercise or pleasure; -- distinguished from a ride taken on horseback.

2. A place suitable or agreeable for driving; a road prepared for driving.

3. Violent or rapid motion; a rushing onward or away; esp., a forced or hurried dispatch of business.

   The Murdstonian drive in business.
   --M. Arnold.

4. In type founding and forging, an impression or matrix, formed by a punch drift.

5. A collection of objects that are driven; a mass of logs to be floated down a river. [Colloq.]

   Syn: See Ride.

6. a private road; a driveway.

7. a strong psychological motivation to perform some activity.

8. (Computers) a device for reading or writing data from or to a data storage medium, as a disk drive, a tape drive, a CD drive, etc.

9. an organized effort by a group to accomplish a goal within a limited period of time; as, a fund-raising drive.

10. a physiological function of an organism motivating it to perform specific behaviors; as, the sex drive.

11. (Football) the period during which one team sustains movement of the ball toward the opponent's goal without losing possession of the ball; as, a long drive downfield.

12. an act of driving a vehicle, especially an automobile; the journey undertaken by driving an automobile; as, to go for a drive in the country.

13. the mechanism which causes the moving parts of a machine to move; as, a belt drive.

14. the way in which the propulsive force of a vehicle is transmitted to the road; as, a car with four-wheel drive, front-wheel drive, etc.

n. 1 (context computing archaic English) A cassette drive. 2 (context computing archaic English) A reel-to-reel tape machine for computers. 3 (context computing English) A tape cartridge interface for computers that reads and/or writes to a tape. 4 A drive mechanism that is used to traverse a tape.

n. a mechanism that transport magnetic tape across the read/write heads of a tape playback/recorder [syn: tape transport, transport]

A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability.

A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a hard disk drive, which provides direct access storage. A disk drive can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive must physically wind tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very slow average seek times to data. However, tape drives can stream data very quickly off tapes once they've hit the right position. For example, Linear Tape-Open (LTO) supported continuous data transfer rates of up to 140 MB/s, comparable to hard disk drives.