Editing File system (section)

==== Tape formatting ====

Writing data to a tape, erasing, or formatting a tape is often a significantly time-consuming process and can take several hours on large tapes.{{Efn|An LTO-6 2.5 TB tape requires more than 4 hours to write at 160 MB/Sec}} With many data tape technologies it is not necessary to format the tape before over-writing new data to the tape. This is due to the inherently destructive nature of overwriting data on sequential media.

Because of the time it can take to format a tape, typically tapes are pre-formatted so that the tape user does not need to spend time preparing each new tape for use. All that is usually necessary is to write an identifying media label to the tape before use, and even this can be automatically written by software when a new tape is used for the first time.