Patent ID: 7562282

Claim:
A disk drive comprising: (a) a disk comprising a plurality of data tracks, wherein each data track comprises a plurality of data sectors; (b) a head actuated over the disk; (c) control circuitry for receiving user data from a host; (d) a redundancy generator for generating a plurality of redundancy symbols appended to the user data to form a codeword C(x) written to a selected one of the data sectors; (e) a syndrome generator for generating a plurality of error syndromes in response to a received codeword C′(x) generated by reading the selected data sector; (f) an error detector, responsive to the error syndromes, for detecting a number of errors in the received codeword C′(x); and (g) a plurality of counters, wherein each counter for counting a number of times the number of detected errors falls within a predetermined range to thereby generate a distribution of the detected errors.