Optical tape is a medium for optical storage

Optical storage

Optical storage is a term from engineering referring to the storage of data on an optically readable medium. Data is recorded by making marks in a pattern that can be read back with the aid of light, usually a beam of laser light precisely focused on a spinning disc. An older example, that does...

 generally consisting of a long and narrow strip of plastic on to which patterns can be written and from which the patterns can be read back. It shares some technologies with cinema film stock

Film stock

Film stock is photographic film on which filmmaking of motion pictures are shot and reproduced. The equivalent in television production is video tape.-1889–1899:...

 and optical disc

Optical disc

In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc is a flat, usually circular disc which encodes binary data in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces...

s, but is compatible with neither. In the 1990s, it was projected that optical tape would be a commonly used, high-capacity, high-speed computer data storage format. At least one working system and several prototypes were developed, but as of 2007, none of these technologies is widely used.

The primary motivation behind developing this technology was the possibility of far greater storage capacities than either magnetic tape or optical discs. For example, the goal of the LOTS project in 1995 was to "achieve a data-transfer rate of at least 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) to store more than 1 terabyte on the IBM cartridge", as well as an average access time of 10 seconds; at the time, these specifications were significantly superior to its primary competitor, magnetic tape

Magnetic tape

Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...

, which only stored about 10-50 gigabytes per cartridge and had a data-transfer rate of about 15 MB/s. It was also considered more durable than magnetic tape, since it's not vulnerable to magnetic fields and is read by lasers instead of physical contact with a magnetic head.

See also

• Creo
  Creo
  Creo, now part of Eastman Kodak Company, was a Burnaby, British Columbia Canada-based company involved in imaging and software technology for computer to plate and digital printing. The name derives from the Latin creo, "I create."...
  
   — Former manufacturer of Optical tape recorders, now a part of Kodak.
• TRAAMS (Tape-based Rapid Access Affordable Mass Storage) — An optical tape technology developed by a consortium led by Terabank, Inc..
• LOTS (Laser Optical Tape Storage) — Another optical tape technology developed by LOTS Technology, Inc.