Apparatus and method of detecting error symbol, and disk drive apparatus using the same

An error symbol detecting method comprising:

• generating correlation evaluation information based on an output of an equalizer corresponding to a channel characteristic and a target output of a modeling tool having a same characteristic as a partial response (PR) target polynomial applied to the equalizer by generating a correlation value correspondinq to the PR target polynomial from the output signal of the equalizer;
• determining an order of probability of error generation of one or more symbols with a sector unit according to a magnitude of the correlation evaluation information;
• and
• determining a predetermined number of symbols having a high probability of generating errors corresponding to the order of probability of error generation as one or more error symbols;
• wherein the equalizer comprises an FIR filter.

A computer readable recording medium having embodied thereon a computer program to execute a method, the method comprising:

• generating correlation evaluation information based on an output of an equalizer corresponding to a channel characteristic and a target output of a modeling tool having a same characteristic as a partial response (PR) target polynomial applied to the equalizer by generating a correlation value corresponding to the PR target polynomial from the output signal of the equalizer;
• determining an order of probability of error generation of one or more symbols with a sector unit according to a magnitude of the correlation evaluation information;
• and
• determining a predetermined number of symbols having a high probability of generating errors corresponding to the order of probability of error generation as one or more error symbols;
• wherein the equalizer comprises a FIR filter.

A disk drive comprising:

• a disk to store information;
• a transducer to read the information from the disk;
• an amplifier to change a gain of a signal detected by the transducer and to amplify the signal to a target level;
• an analog/digital transducer to convert the amplified signal to a digital signal;
• an equalizer to receive the digital signal that is converted by the analog/digital transducer and to equalize the digital signal to have a channel equalizing characteristic suitable for a corresponding system;
• a data detector to detect data from the signal output from the equalizer;
• a modeling tool corresponding to a partial response (PR) target polynomial that is applied to the system;
• a correlation evaluation information generating unit to generate correlation evaluation information based on a correlation between the signal output of the equalizer and a target output of the modeling tool;
• and
• an error symbol determination unit to determine an order of probability of error generation of one or more symbols based on the correlation evaluation information, and to determine a predetermined number of symbols corresponding to the order of probability of error generation as one or more error symbols the error symbol determination unit having:
• a serial-parallel transducer to output the correlation evaluation information of the symbol unit generated by the correlation evaluation information generating unit in a sector unit in parallel;
• a comparator to determine an order of the probability of error generation of the one or more symbols according to a magnitude of the correlation evaluation information output from the serial-parallel transducer;
• and
• an error symbol determiner to determine the predetermined number of symbols as the one or more error symbols according to the order of the probability of error generation of the one or more symbols, and to output the determination result to an error correction decoder.

A method of detecting errors in a data storage device, the method comprising:

• generating a first signal corresponding to a partial response (PR) polynomial;
• generating a second signal corresponding to the PR polynomial;
• generating correlation evaluation information based on the first signal and the second signal;
• determining an order of probability of error generation of one or more symbols corresponding to the correlation evaluation information;
• and
• determining at least one symbol having a high probability of generating errors corresponding to the order of probability of error generation of one or more symbols;
• wherein the PR polynomial corresponds to a channel characteristic of the data storage device,
• wherein the determining the order of the probability of error generation further comprises ranking the one or more symbols with respect to each other based on a value associated with each of the one or more symbols in a manner that a symbol associated with a greater value can be ranked higher than an other symbol associated with a lesser value.