Single-head detection in the presence of offtrack interference

Offtrack interference (OTI) arises as a result of read head misalignment and is likely to become the dominant noise source in future magnetic storage channels that feature high track densities. In this paper, based on a two-track and single-head model for OTI, we discuss two different equalization/detection techniques. One is based on suppressing OTI using a linear equalizer and then performing partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) detection of the main track data. The other views OTI as the channel´s response to an independent data and sets out to simultaneously estimate the two data sequences using joint PRML. The detection performance is evaluated in terms of effective detection signal to noise ratio, and comparison is made on the two methods