Magnetic card

A magnetic card is a rectangular object that contains either a magnetic strip on the outside or a magnetic object in the card that contains data. A magnetic card may contain information about an individual, such as available credit on a credit card or pass codes for entering secure buildings. The picture is an example of a magnetic card being swiped through a magnetic card reader.

SuperDisk

Alternatively referred to as an LS-120 and LS-240, the SuperDisk is a disk drive and diskette introduced by 3M, which later became Imation. The drive was most popular ith OEMcomputers, such as Compaq and Packard Bell computers.

The original SuperDisk (shown in the picture to the right) is capable of holding 120 MB on a single disk the same size of a traditional 1.44 MB floppy diskette. Later, SuperDisks were capable of holding 240 MB. The SuperDisk drive was also backward compatible with 1.44 MB disks. Its available interfaces were IDE/ATAPI, parallel port, SCSI, and USB.

The SuperDisk did not become very popular primarily because of the Iomega Zip drive, which had already gained success before the SuperDisk was released. Today, neither the SuperDisk or the Zip drive are used because of technology like the CD-R disc and USB thumb drives.

Tape

A tape is a magnetically thin coated piece of plastic wrapped around wheels capable of storing data. Tape is less expensive than other storage mediums, but it is a much slower solution because it is sequential access and is often used for backing up large amounts of data.  Today, tape has mostly been abandoned for faster and more reliable solutions like disc drives, hard drives, and flash drives that are all direct access and cloud storage. The image to the right is a picture and example of magnetic tape taken by KENPEI and shared under the creative commons.

How much can a tape drive store?

The storage capacity of a tape drive all depends on the type of tape drive and technology being used. For example, the first tape drive introduced by Remington Rand in 1951 was only capable of storing 224 KB of data. Later tape drives released in the early 2000s were capable of storing several TB of data. For example, the IBM TS1155 generation 6 tape drive released in 2017 is capable of storing 15 TB of uncompressed data.