Maxtor Corporation

Jinghuan Chen

Jingfeng Liu

Rose Shao

Raymond Pavlak, Jr

Steve Aronson

A decoding system includes a timing loop for use in error recovery mode operations, in which 'fast decode' bit values that are used for timing recovery purposes in the normal modes of operation are replaced, at an appropriate iteration in the error recovery mode, with detected bit values from an iterative detector. The replacement occurs after a reread operation in which the timing loop maintains lock.

Timing recovery in error recovery for iterative detection

Methods are disclosed for detecting a thermal asperity condition of a head that is configured to generate a read signal by reading data on a rotatable data storage disk in a disk drive. The read signal includes a data component and a thermal component. The read signal is compared to a thermal asperity threshold to detect occurrence of an excessive level of the thermal component of the read signal as a thermal asperity condition of the head. The thermal asperity threshold is varied in response to a rate of occurrence of data value transitions in the data component of the read signal. The thermal asperity threshold can be increased in response to a decrease in the rate of occurrence of data value transitions, and can be decreased in response to an increase in the rate of occurrence of data value transitions. By varying the thermal asperity threshold, the sensitivity of the thermal asperity detector may be improved to allow lower level thermal asperity conditions to be detected with increased accuracy. Related disk drives are also disclosed.

Detecting a thermal asperity condition of a disk drive head responsive to data value transitions

Methods of compensating for radial incoherence in servo information that is read from adjacent servo tracks that have a phase offset relative to one another on a data storage disk of a disk drive are provided. While a transducer is seeking to a target track, the transducer generate a servo information signal that has a first component from servo information read from a first servo track on the disk and a second component from servo information read from a second servo track that is radially adjacent to the first servo track. The servo information in the first and second servo tracks are offset by a non-zero phase error relative to one another and are in a same servo sector on the disk. The servo information signal is sampled to generate a series of sampled servo values. A phase error of a group of the sampled servo values is determined. The sampled servo values are compensated in response to the determined phase error to generate compensated servo values with at least reduced phase error.

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Newport Beach, CA, United States of America

Jinghuan Chen