Effect of Preamplifier on Timing Recovery in Magnetic Recording Channels

We study the effect of the preamplifier cutoff frequency on the timing recovery performance of perpendicular magnetic recording systems with independent and identically distributed (IID) random input bits as well as run lengthlimited (RLL) encoded inputs. We observe that a larger cutoff frequency has a detrimental effect on the system performance. When using an RLL encoder with an IID input we observe a slight loss in performance. However, the true benefit of RLL codes is to prevent catastrophic failures for the worst-case inputs.