Performance of digital magnetic recording with equalization and offtrack interference

The relative performance of well-equalized peak detection, partial response, and decision feedback detection in an intertrack-interference (ITI)-dominated noise environment is calculated, showing that it depends heavily on the intertrack interference. It is found that equalized peak detection performs relatively well at low linear density and extreme offtrack positions (e.g. 20%) and that partial response with Viterbi detector performs the best at small offtrack positions. However, overall, the decision feedback equalizer provides the best performance for a given amount of complexity, and its advantages are discussed. Tolerance to offtrack error as a function of linear density and, taking offtrack performance into account, tradeoffs between increasing linear or areal density are addressed