MAGNETIC-TAPE DRIVE AND MAGNETIC-TAPE HEAD COMPATIBLE WITH MULTIPLE TAPE FORMATS

摘要

Embodiments of the present invention are directed to the design and implementation of backward-compatible magnetic tape drives (102) that are read/write compatible with a current magnetic-tape format (1820) as well as one or more previous magnetic-tape formats (1802 and 1804). Embodiments of the present invention include read/write tape-head configurations (1902, 1904, 1906, 1908-1923, 1930, 1932, 1934, 2102) and corresponding magnetic-tape-drive-component features (518) that allow a magnetic-tape drive to read and write magnetic tapes formatted according to different formats.