A magnetic tape drive designed to read and write data while the tape remains in continuous motion. Unlike older start-stop drives that paused between data blocks, streaming drives require a constant, high-speed feed of data from the host to maintain their speed. If the host buffer empties, the drive must stop, rewind, and reposition, a severe performance penalty known as shoe-shining.
Heard on the job
The backup job is taking twice as long because the server can't feed the streaming tape drive fast enough, causing it to shoe-shine all night.
Insider tip
To get maximum performance from a streaming tape drive, the network and disk arrays must be able to saturate the drive's write speed.