Method and system for providing tape-format compatibility between various types of tape heads

Certain embodiments of the present invention are directed to magnetic-tape drives that employ data-set-multiplexing magnetic-tape formats in order to achieve compatibility in magnetic-tape formats with respect to a variety of different magnetic-tape-drive tape-head configurations and dimensions. While previous and current magnetic-tape drives employ magnetic-tape formats that feature linear sequences of data sets along the tracks that are read or written during a single pass, or wrap, magnetic-tape drives of the present invention feature magnetic tape that contains data formatted according to a data-set-multiplexing magnetic-tape format, the data-set-multiplexing magnetic-tape format including, for each multiple-track wrap within a band, two or more parallel sequences of data sets written to the multiple tracks of the multiple-track wrap.