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, is much slower than accessing data on disks. Tapes are sequential-access media, which means that to get to a particular point on the tape, the tape must go through all the preceding points. In contrast, disks are random-access media because a disk drive can access any point at random without passing through intervening points.
Because tapes are so slow, they are generally used only for long-term storage and backup. Data to be used regularly is almost always kept on a disk. Tapes are also used for transporting large amounts of data.
Tapes come in a variety of sizes and formats.
Tapes are sometimes called streamers or streaming tapes.
Read Also:
- 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.
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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).
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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 […]
- targeted attack
In computer and network security terminology, a targeted attack is one that has been aimed at a specific user, company or organization. These attacks are not widespread, but rather are designed to attack and breech a specific target.