What is a tape device?

A tape device is a generic term that means a tape library or a stand-alone tape drive.

A tape library (robotic library) is a high-capacity storage device that contains:

• one or more tape drives
• multiple (up to several thousand) slots to hold tapes
• one or more changers (robotic mechanisms) intended to move the tapes between the slots and the tape drives.

It may also contain other components such as barcode readers or barcode printers.

An autoloader is a particular case of tape libraries. It contains one drive, several slots, a changer and a barcode reader (optional).

A stand-alone tape drive (also called streamer) contains one slot and can hold only one tape at a time.