PERFORMANCE OF DIGITAL MAGNETIC RECORDING WITH EQUALIZATION AND OFFTRACK INTERFERENCE

Offtrack or intertrack interference (ITI) is the result of recording head positioning error and is often the dominant noise source in the magnetic disk storage channel. Therefore, ITI should be considered when evaluating the performance of various detection systems. Previous work in this area has focused on estimating the performance of analog peak detection using an appropriate ITI model. In this paper, we calculate the relative performance of well-equalized peak detection, partial response, and decision feedback detection in an ITI-dominated noise environment. We thus gain new insight into the best type of detection system (for a given complexity) to use on the magnetic-disk storage channel. In addition, tolerance to offtrack error as a function of linear density is presented. Taking offtrack performance into account, we also investigate tradeoffs between increasing linear or areal density.