Patent ID: 8276045

Claim:
A method for writing data to a multi-track data tape, comprising: receiving a stream of user data symbols, the stream comprising a data set; segmenting the data set into a plurality S of unencoded subdata sets, each subdata set comprising an array having K 2 rows and K 1 columns; for each of the S unencoded subdata sets, generating N 1 −K 1 C1-parity bytes for each row of a subdata set and appending the C1-parity bytes to the end of the row to form an encoded C1 codeword having a length N 1 ; for each of the S unencoded subdata sets, generating N 2 −K 2 C2-parity bytes for each column of the subdata set and appending the C2-parity bytes to the end of the column to form an encoded C2 codeword having a length N 2 , whereby S encoded subdata set are generated having N 2 C1 codewords; from the S encoded subdata sets, forming a plurality (S×N 2 )/2 codeword objects (COs), each comprising a first header, a first C1 codeword, a second header and a second C1 codeword; mapping each CO onto a logical data track according to information within the first and second headers of the CO; modulation encoding the COs into synchronized COs; and writing T synchronized COs simultaneously to the tape, where T equals the number of concurrent active tracks on the tape.