tape drive
A device, like a tape recorder, that reads data from and writes it onto a tape. Tape drives have data capacities of anywhere from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes. Their transfer speeds also vary considerably. Fast tape drives can transfer as much as 20MB (megabytes) per second.
The disadvantage of tape drives is that they are sequential-access devices, which means that to read any particular block of data, you need to read all the preceding blocks. This makes them much too slow for general-purpose storage operations. However, they are the least expensive media for making backups.
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- tape
A magnetically coated strip of plastic on which data can be encoded. Tapes for computers are similar to tapes used to store music. Storing data on tapes is considerably cheaper than storing data on disks. Tapes also have large storage capacities, ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes. Accessing data on tapes, however, […]
- tar
(1) Short for tape archive, a UNIX utility that combines a group of files into a single file. The resulting file has a .tar extension. The tar command does not compress files. Frequently, therefore, a tar file is compressed with the compress or gzip commands to create a file with a .tar.gz or .tar.Z extension. […]
- tarball
An archive of files created with the Unix tar utility. Source-code distributions have been packaged as tarballs since the mid 1980s, even though the term’s usage did not become commonplace until the late 1990s.
- target
Synonymous with destination, a target is a file, device or any type of location to which data is moved or copied. Many computer commands involve copying data from one place to another. One says that the computer copies from the source to the target (or destination).
- target initiated termination
A mechanism of the PCI standard where the target of a data transfer is given the ability to terminate a data transfer between it and the bus master if the target device monopolizes the bus due to slow access time. Access time is measured in clock cycles, and the target will abort the data transfer […]