Performance analysis of magnetic recording systems

Approximations to the union bound performance of sequence detection in the presence of colored noise and an algorithm to compute bit error and error event probabilities are presented and compared to bit-by-bit simulation results. These computations, which are very accurate at bit error probabilities less than or equal to 10(-3), are then used to analyze the performance of standard and reverse concatenated Reed-Solomon(RS)/modulation coding schemes for generalized partial-response channels corrupted by colored noise. The analysis is used to determine the optimum RS code rate for recording systems that are of current interest.