On the performance of soft Reed-Solomon decoding for magnetic recording channels with erasures

The impact of erasures on the performance of soft-decision Reed-Solomon (RS) decoding for partial-response-equalized magnetic recording channels has been investigated, and the results compared with a similar system using a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. The system using soft-decision RS decoding exhibits better performance than the one using an LDPC code when the length of a continuous erasure exceeds a certain threshold.