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 coding are done in firmware. 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.

Free Online Dictionary of Computing