Digital Linear Tape


Digital Linear Tape

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

DLT drives implement the Digital Lempel Ziv 1 (DLZ1)compression algorithm in a combination of hardware andfirmware. 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 theHuffman algorithm?).

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