Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Linear Tape-Open cartridges stay offline and cost far less per terabyte than spinning disks. The figure is taken from LTO Program, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a technology fact?

Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

What else can I read about it?

The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

Magnetic tape still archives most large data sets

Linear Tape-Open cartridges stay offline and cost far less per terabyte than spinning disks LTO was launched in 1998 by Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Seagate, and each generation has roughly doubled native capacity. A cartridge holds data in many parallel tracks written at once, and reading it back means winding to the right position, so random access is slow. Archives like tape because an unpowered cartridge cannot be reached over a network. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

LTO Program

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

Go further

Technology trivia

More facts like this

Stored files can rot without anyone touching themMagnetic, optical and flash media all lose data slowly, and a checksum is often the only sign that anything changed The first commercial hard disk stored five megabytes of dataThe IBM 350 disk storage unit used fifty magnetic platters each measuring twenty inches across The floppy disk was created by IBM engineers led by Alan Shugart in 1967Flexible magnetic vinyl disks enclosed in plastic sleeves provided portable computer storage Magnetic tape was introduced for computer data storage on the UNIVAC I in 1951UNISERVO tape drives replaced heavy punched card stacks with flexible magnetic media Flash memory was invented at Toshiba in 1980Fujio Masuoka's team built a cell that held its data with no power, and Intel sold the first commercial chip in 1988 Flash cells wear out after a few thousand erasesNAND must be erased a whole block at a time, so controllers spread writes across spare blocks to even the damage

Tags: tape, archiving, storage

Magnetic tape still archives most large data sets: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Linear Tape-Open cartridges stay offline and cost far less per terabyte than spinning disks. The figure is taken from LTO Program, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.