Magnetic tape is 1/2 inch wide, and holds about 300,000 customer records (depending on their size). Tape records are sequential (one after the other) whereas disk records can be in random order. Tape is the cheapest way to store information, but the data is hard to get at. Tape is used for backup and for sending information from one computer to another. Direct marketing tapes are 9 track, and 1600 or 6250 bytes per inch. They are ASCII or EBCDIC.