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“Tape Drive is slower than the other systems such as HDD or SSD.” We often hear this comment at exhibitions. In other words, most people do not know the advantages of Tape Drive such as cost effectiveness, reliability and speed.

The speed of storage devices such as Tape Drive or HDD can be divided into two types: Access Time and Transfer Rate. Access Time is the time needed before reading or writing data. Transfer Rate is the amount of data moved from one place to another in a given time.

The reason why Tape Drive is said to be “slow” comes from Access Time. It is true that HDD can reach the data quicker than Tape Drive. On the other hand, Transfer Rate of Tape Drive exceed 300MB per second without compression and it is more than 20% faster in comparison with HDD.

When the large volume of data is backed up, archived and restored, Tape Drive completes its task earlier than HDD even though Tape Drive starts reading and writing later.