Patent ID: 8032814

Claim:
A method for operating a probe-based data storage device in which user data is written to and read from an array of A d storage fields by a corresponding array of probes, the method comprising: coding blocks of user data to produce, from each user data block, a plurality of C-byte codewords such that r*C=k 1 *A s where r is the number of codewords, k 1 is an integer ≧1, A s =A d /k 0 and k 0 is an integer greater than or equal to 2; for each user data block, producing A s sub-blocks of k 1 bytes from the r codewords produced from that user data block by selecting successive bytes of each sub-block cyclically from the r codewords; for successive groups of k 0 user data blocks, writing the A s sub-blocks produced from each of the k 0 blocks to a respective sub-array (SA 1 to SA k 0 ), of A s storage fields, of the storage field array by writing to x sub-arrays at a time, where x is an integer in the range 1≦x≦k 0 wherein the A s sub-blocks written to each sub-array (SA 1 to SA k 0 ) are written via respective probes to the corresponding storage fields of the sub-array; and reading the sub-blocks from the sub-arrays (SA 1 to SAk 0 ) by reading y sub-arrays at a time, where y is an integer in the range 1≦y≦k 0 .