A five-head, three-track, magnetic recording channel

Performance loss caused by the inter-track interference (ITI) in recording channels may be alleviated through the use of multiple-head systems simultaneously writing and reading a number of adjacent tracks. We consider a five-head, three-track system, and show that there is no loss in performance of the system due to ITI, under some broad assumptions. We also show that, under these assumptions, the codes designed to provide certain coding gain in single-track, single-head systems, provide the same coding gain in five-head, three-track systems