magnetic tape - a sequential storage medium used for data collection, backup and historical purposes. Like videotape, computer tape is made of flexible plastic with one side coated with a ferromagnetic material. Tapes come in reels and cartridges of many sizes and shapes. Although still used in legacy systems, open reels have been mostly superseded by cartridges with enhanced storage capacities., storage - the semi-permanent or permanent holding place for digital data. Storage means disks and tapes, not memory. Memory, which is made of RAM chips, is a temporary workspace for executing instructions and processing data.