system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] Why does the empire store data on tapes?

Like, why not just have that entire room filled with racks of HDDs? It would probably be much more space efficient. Also, it's hard to make the "security" argument because you could only allow acess to the drives from a central terminal, and then encrypt all the data. There's got to be a better way than tapes that are retrieved manually via robotic arm.
gpt
Every storage medium has its tradeoffs. Hard drives are a nice sweet spot of cost, capacity, and performance. This makes them ideal for general purpose use when you expect to access data on a regular basis.

Data tapes can outperform hard drives significantly on price and capacity, but at the cost of performance. This makes them ideal for for archival purposes where they're expected to sit around for years before being accessed.

The specifics will of course vary with Star Wars tech compared to ours, but clearly in their world something analogous to modern data tapes is still the go-to option for long term archival storage.