Editing Computer data storage (section)

=== Robotic storage ===
Large quantities of individual magnetic tapes, and optical or magneto-optical discs may be stored in robotic tertiary storage devices. In tape storage field they are known as [[tape libraries]], and in optical storage field [[optical jukebox]]es, or optical disk libraries per analogy. The smallest forms of either technology containing just one drive device are referred to as [[Tape library#Autoloaders|autoloaders]] or [[Record changer|autochangers]].

Robotic-access storage devices may have a number of slots, each holding individual media, and usually one or more picking robots that traverse the slots and load media to built-in drives. The arrangement of the slots and picking devices affects performance. Important characteristics of such storage are possible expansion options: adding slots, modules, drives, robots. Tape libraries may have from 10 to more than 100,000 slots, and provide [[terabyte]]s or [[petabyte]]s of near-line information. Optical jukeboxes are somewhat smaller solutions, up to 1,000 slots.

Robotic storage is used for [[backup]]s, and for high-capacity archives in imaging, medical, and video industries. [[Hierarchical storage management]] is a most known archiving strategy of automatically ''migrating'' long-unused files from fast hard disk storage to libraries or jukeboxes. If the files are needed, they are ''retrieved'' back to disk.