scope:

This International Standard specifies the physical and magnetic characteristics of a 3,81 mm wide magnetic tape cartridge to enable physical interchangeability of such cartridges between drives. It also specifies the quality of the recorded signals, the recording method and the recorded format - called Digital Data Storage 4 (DDS-4) - thereby allowing data interchange between drives by means of such magnetic tape cartridges.

Information interchange between systems also requires, at a minimum, agreement between the interchange parties upon the interchange code(s) and the specifications of the structure and labelling of the information on the interchanged cartridge.

Under information interchange circumstances in which a processing algorithm, e.g. for lossless data compression as specified in ISO/IEC 11558, is applied to the host data prior to recording on the tape and a complementary reprocessing algorithm is applied after the data is read from the tape, agreement upon these by the interchange parties is also required.