Patent ID: 8743500

Claim:
A data storage system, comprising: a tape channel for reading data from a magnetic tape medium to produce a signal; an adaptive noise whitening filter configured to receive the signal, wherein the noise whitening filter is configured to minimize variance of noise affecting the signal output from the noise whitening filter; a soft Dual-Max (DMAX) detector configured to receive the signal from the noise whitening filter, the soft detector configured to calculate first soft information about each bit of the signal and send the first soft information to a soft decoder; and the soft decoder positioned subsequent to the soft detector, the soft decoder being configured to calculate second soft information about each bit of the signal and send the second soft information to the soft DMAX detector, wherein one or more noise whitening coefficients used in the noise whitening filter are configured to be updated using a noise whitening filter coefficient updater, and wherein the noise whitening filter is configured to process the signal according to the following equation: W(D)=1−(p 1 D+ . . . +p λ D λ ), where p 1 . . . pλ are the noise whitening coefficients, and where the tape channel is characterized by a transfer polynomia F(D)=1+f 1 D+ . . . +f L D L where D is delay corresponding to bit duration, L represents a memory length of the tape channel, and λ represents a memory length of the noise whitening filter.