the s3 cheapest storage uses tapes or some ancient storage device, very slow?
You actually hit the nail right on the head! The absolute cheapest tier of Amazon S3—S3 Glacier Deep Archive—is the cloud equivalent of a high-tech digital warehouse. It relies heavily on a technology many assume is obsolete: magnetic tape (alongside heavily customized, powered-down hard drives).
While Amazon keeps its exact hardware proprietary, industry teardowns and system behaviors point to massive, automated robotic tape libraries handling this data. Far from a dusty 1980s cassette player, these are cutting-edge, ultra-high-density enterprise tape systems.
Here is exactly how it works, why it is so cheap, and just how slow it can be.