First Tape drive media appeared all the way back in 1951 and had a name that made tape cartridges this was actually the tape drive that was used for the famous UNIVAC one the first-ever commercial computer built in the US the Univac took up an entire room and not surprisingly you know servo was a behemoth as well holding nearly a quarter-mile of tape on large reels but only about 225 kilobytes of data later though tape storage became more practical due to switching from heavy metal tapes to plastic tape coated in magnetic substances that store the actual data more advanced recording methods such as using the entire width of the tape to increase data density health brain capacities over the years to 10 terabytes today in a package.
that weighs only half a pound but then why don't we see people using tape drives and personal rigs very often aside from the drives being very expensive they also tend to very slow think about how long it took to rewind the tape from Storage media way back in the day when they were still a thing unlike hard drives or SSDs which can go directly to the data you want in a small fraction of a second tape drive have to wind.
that weighs only half a pound but then why don't we see people using tape drives and personal rigs very often aside from the drives being very expensive they also tend to very slow think about how long it took to rewind the tape from Storage media way back in the day when they were still a thing unlike hard drives or SSDs which can go directly to the data you want in a small fraction of a second tape drive have to wind.