Digital Linear Tape
Synonyms
DLT
(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 coding 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.