Digital Linear Tape

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Digital Linear Tape



(DLT) A kind of magnetic tape drive originally developed by DEC and now marketed by Quantum.

DLT drives implement the Digital Lempel Ziv 1 (DLZ1) compression algorithm in a combination of hardware and firmware. They use a popular chip by Stac (now hi/fn) to do the string searching. Counting, sorting and Huffman encoding are done in firmware (with hardware support for the Huffman algorithm?).

In April 1997 DLT drives can transfer 5 megabytes per second and can store 35 gigabytes on a single cartridge. Compression might roughly double these figures.

(1997-04-05)