Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed for implementing sector management in drives having multiple modulation coding. A circuit may be configured to generate a data sector having a first number of bits based on a first modulation encoding scheme associated with a first location of a data storage medium, determine a difference between the first number of bits and a second number of bits corresponding to a second modulation encoding scheme associated with a second location of the data storage medium, append a number of padding bits to the data sector based on the difference, and store the data sector to the second location of the data storage medium. The data sector may be a sector reallocated from the first location to the second location. The data sector may also be an intermediate parity sector stored to a media cache region of the data storage device.

Abstract: An apparatus may include a circuit that initializes a read operation to read one or more requested data segments of a respective data unit. The circuit may generate equalized combined samples for a failed data segment of the one or more requested data segments based on first samples and second samples. In addition, the circuit may perform iterative outer code recovery for the data unit utilizing the equalized combined samples as samples for the failed data segment.