Tape Drives are best known for their stability, but suffer with respect to more common storage devices (external hard drive.
There are a few different formats for tape drive, but the most common is DDS/DAT tapes. Other formats are LTO tapes, also known as Ultrium, AIT tapes, VXA tapes, and Travan tapes, though these are less common. Usually thee is no inter-compatibility between formats.
Most tape drives use a SCSI connection to hook up to your computer. This means you may need a Firewire.
DDS/DAT
The latest iteration of this format is DAT 320 which holds about 160 GB of data uncompressed. The DAT format (and other formats) are usually advertised to have double the data capacity they actually do because the manufacturer assumes 2:1 data compression, which is a standard feature on tape drives. Its important to note that even reverse-compatibility between tape drives is not assured. DAT 80 tapes, for instance, may or may not run on a drive formatted for DAT 320, but usually they will not.
Here are the most common types of DAT format drives used today:
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*DAT 72 Tapes
*DAT 320 Tapes
* SCSI based DAT Tape Drives
* USB based DAT Tape Drives
* Firewire based DAT Tape Drives
* Internal DAT based Tape Drives
* External DAT based Tape Drives
