International Business Machines Corporation

Giovanni Cherubinni

Evangelos Stavros Eleftheriou

Charalampos Pozidis

Thomas R Albrecht

Ajay Dholakia

Theodore Antonakopoulos

A probe-based data storage device includes a storage surface having an array of A storage fields; a probe array comprising A probes for writing data to respective storage fields; and an apparatus for controlling writing of blocks of user data in the array of storage fields.

Probe-based data storage devices

Methods and apparatus are provided for controlling writing and reading of data in an array of A storage fields of a probe-based data storage device in which data is written to and read from the array of storage fields by a corresponding array of probes. One method provides error-tolerance by exploiting the inherent parallelism of the probe storage array. A user data block to be written to the A-field array is first coded to produce a plurality of C-byte codewords, such that r&#xb7;C=kA where r is the number of codewords and kis an integer greater than or equal to 1. A sub-blocks of kbytes are produced from the codewords by selecting successive bytes of each sub-block cyclically from the r codewords. The A sub-blocks are then written via respective probes to the corresponding storage fields of the storage field array.

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Rueschlikon, Switzerland

Giovanni Cherubinni