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tape cartridge

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tape cartridge

[′tāp ‚kär·trij]
(engineering acoustics)
A cartridge that holds a length of magnetic tape in such a way that the cartridge can be slipped into a tape recorder and played without threading the tape; in stereophonic usage, usually refers to an eight-track continuous-loop cartridge, which is larger than a cassette. Also known as cartridge.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

tape cartridge

A removable module that holds magnetic tape. Cartridges hold a single reel of tape, whereas a tape cassette contains both supply and take-up reels. As of 2020, LTO is one of the few surviving tape cartridge systems. See cartridge and magnetic tape. Contrast with tape cassette.


Continuous Loop and No Loop
On the left is an old 8-track tape with a continuous loop that remains inside the cartridge. On the right is an LTO cartridge. After insertion into the drive, the tape is pulled out and coiled onto a take-up reel. See 8-track tape and LTO.
Copyright © 1981-2025 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.
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References in periodicals archive
Imation LTO Ultrium generation 4 tape cartridges feature innovative and patented technologies that make Imation's LTO cartridges more robust than competitive offerings.
Longitudinal recording media have a fixed number of parallel tracks (e.g., 18 tracks for 3480 tape cartridges) laid across the length of the tape that are written to or read from the beginning of the tape to its end.
The proposed magnetic tape cartridge will meet this requirement in a "shirt pocket" size by providing longer and higher coercivity tape than has been available previously.
Removable data storage products supplier Imation Corp (NYSE:IMN) announced on Friday it will begin shipping its Imation LTO Ultrium Generation 5 tape cartridges.
The future of tape storage is rapidly heading toward multi-terabyte tape cartridges. To achieve this, data track widths below 10 um and closed loop tracking of under 100 nm will be required.
The Scalar 24 offer's one or two SLDT 600 drives and 21 tape cartridges.
New disk-based products in this segment have difficulty competing with the sheer low cost of a shelved tape cartridge. However, a company may be liable for the reproduction of historical data and tape offers no certainty of data restorability or integrity.
Storing up to 1.3 TB of compressed data (500 GB uncompressed) on a single half-inch tape cartridge, the high-capacity SAIT-1 drive combines the data density advantages of helical-scan recording with the longer and wider tape usually associated with linear tape drives.
Together, the library offerings give users a range of from 1 to 400 drives and from 24 to more than 50,000 LTO tape cartridges. With LTO-2 technology, each library doubles its capacity to 400 GB per tape cartridge and more than doubles its data transfer rates to 70 MB per second per drive.(a)
$120 or $0.75 per GB, a tape cartridge with the native 160GB capacity sells for $40 or $0.25 per GB and using 2:1 compression is $0.125 per GB.
IBM has announced that it has recorded 1 terabyte (TB) of data to a linear digital tape cartridge, storing nearly 10 times more data than any linear tape cartridge currently available.
Based on technology licensed from Quantum Corp the DLT1 tape drive offers 80Gb of compressed capacity and a 6Mb/s compressed transfer rate enabling small to medium sized storage servers or workstations to be backed up on one single tape cartridge. The system is backward read-compatible with the company's DLT4000 product and utilises DLTtape IV media.
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