Magnetic Tape
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Magnetic tape is a flexible plastic tape coated with magnetic material that is widely used when a large amount of data is to be processed sequentially. An advantage of magnetic tape is that it is a very cheap and economical storage medium. Its major disadvantage is that it is very slow and it is only sequential.
Cartridge Tape
Cartridge tape contains magnetic recording tape in a rectangular plastic box. One quarter-inch wide cartridge is normally used with personal computers for backup. Another 1½ inch tape is normally used with minicomputers and mainframe computers
Reel-to-Reel Tape
Reel-to-reel tape consists of two reels. The supply reel is used to no hold the tape during reading and write operations. The take-up reel is used to hold the portions of the supply reel as it is being processed. When the tape moves from one reel to another it passes over a read/write head to read or write data.
