An error-correction scheme for a helical-scan magnetic data storage system

An error-correction scheme for a helical-scan magnetic recording system is presented. The system consists of a commercial VHS video cassette recorder with the front-end electronics adapted for high-speed digital recording. Error statistics have been collected and show a bursty error recording channel both within each track and from track-to-track. The proposed error-correction scheme uses interleaved Reed-Solomon codes. The interleaving function consists of a two-level interleaver performing track interleaving and byte interleaving. An efficient interleaving implementation is presented