(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.