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The recording performance of a new magnetic tape based on ultra-fine, perpendicularly-oriented BaFe particles was investigated. Specifically, using a low lateral tape motion demonstration platform, a new servo pattern written on the advanced perpendicularly oriented BaFe medium, a new low friction head technology, a novel synchronous servo channel design, and advanced servo control concepts, we were able to demonstrate a record closed-loop track-follow performance with a 23.4 nm standard deviation of position-error signal, roughly one order of magnitude better than in current tape products. In addition, using read back waveforms captured on the same advanced perpendicularly oriented BaFe medium with a 0.2-m-wide data reader, we demonstrated write/read performance at 518 kbpi using advanced noise-predictive maximum likelihood (NPML) detection schemes. Combining these two results, we estimate that the new medium can support an areal recording density of up to 29.5 Gb/in 2 . This result demonstrates the scalability and extendability of tape technology using low-cost particulate media.

The performance of magnetic recording systems that include conventional modulation codes combined with multiple parity bits is studied. Various performance measures, including bit error rate at the output of the inverse precoder, byte error probability at the input of the Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder and sector error rate, are used to evaluate the performance of various coding/detection schemes. Suboptimum detection/decoding schemes consisting of a 16-state noise-predictive maximum-likelihood (NPML) detector followed by parity-based noise-predictive post-processing, and maximum-likelihood sequence detection/decoding on the combined channel/parity trellis are considered. For conventional modulation codes, it is shown that although the dual-parity post-processor gains 0.5 dB over the single-parity post-processor in terms of bit-and byte-error-rate performance, the sector-error-rate performance of both schemes is almost the same. Furthermore, the sector-error-rate performance of optimum 64-state combined channel/parity detection for the dual-parity code is shown to be approximately 0.1 dB better than that of optimum 32-state combined channel/parity detection for the single-parity code. These performance gains can be even more substantial if appropriate coding techniques that eliminate certain error events and minimize error burst length or multiparity codes in conjunction with combined parity/channel detection are used.Index Terms-Noise-predictive maximum-likelihood detection, noise-predictive post-processing, parity check codes, sector error probability.

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