A heuristic method for error correction in parallel probe-based storage devices

This paper presents a new decoding algorithm that improves the reliability of probe-based storage devices, that use multiple, simultaneously accessed parallel fields, when they are affected by burst errors. The presented algorithm exploits the parallelism of the multiple storage fields and the used data allocation method and flags symbols as erasures using the error locations revealed by the initial errors-only decoding attempt. Numerical results demonstrate the performance improvement that is achieved by the proposed algorithm.