Performance of serially concatenated convolutional turbo codes for magnetic recording

Performance of serially concatenated convolutional turbo codes has been evaluated for the Lorentzian channel using simulation, and experimentally for a real hard disk drive. The experimental results are consistent with simulations, which show a substantial gain over uncoded systems. To limit the number of unnecessary iterations, two stopping criteria were studied. One of them, namely, the observed hard decisions method, was used in the drive data experiment.