Magnetic Tape Proves Its Value In The AI Storage Era

Magnetic tape is experiencing a resurgence in 2025 as AI-driven data growth, cyber security pressures and new material innovations push organisations back towards a technology first introduced more than seventy years ago.

What Magnetic Tape Is And How It Works

Magnetic tape stores data on a long, narrow strip of plastic film coated with a magnetic layer. The tape is wound inside a cartridge and passed across a read and write head inside the drive. Since the tape must move sequentially, it is not designed for fast, random access in the way a hard disk or SSD is. It is instead designed for efficient, bulk writing and long-term storage.