Patent ID: 9712188
Date: 2017-07-18
CPC Classifications: G06F,G11B,H03M

Claim:
1. A computer program product for reading data from a magnetic tape, the computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the embodied program instructions executable by a processor of a linear tape drive to cause the processor to: read, by the processor, packets of data from M parallel data tracks of the magnetic tape to obtain a plurality of (D+P)-symbol codewords which are logically arranged in nM encoded blocks, each packet comprising a row of an encoded block, wherein D is a number of data symbols and P is a number of parity symbols in each (D+P)-symbol codeword, wherein each encoded block comprises an array having rows and columns of code symbols in which each column comprises a codeword of a column code, wherein symbols of each of the (D+P)-symbol codewords are distributed over corresponding rows of the nM encoded blocks, and wherein n is an integer greater than zero; decode, by the processor, sub-blocks from rows and columns of a plurality of product codewords from the nM encoded blocks, each product codeword comprising a logical array of code symbols having the rows which comprise respective row codewords and the columns which comprise respective column codewords, wherein each sub-block comprises a logical array having rows and columns of data symbols; combine, by the processor, the sub-blocks to form a block of data; and output, by the processor, the block of data.