Digital Linear Tape

storage (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 Huffmanencoding 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)