Hard Drive Against Tape Drive

Prior to the introduction of hard drives, the main medium of storage used specially by mainframe computers is known as the Tape Drive. There are significant differences between the two storage mediums which include:
• Magnetic recording material on tape is coated on a thin plastic strip, hard drives utilize layered high precision aluminum or glass disk;
• The seek operation is faster on a hard drive compared to a tape drive;
• The head on a tape drive comes in contact with the media while on a hard drive there is no actual contact but flies over the media;
• A hard drive can store huge amounts of data in a relatively small space compared to a tape drive.

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