Sources of noise in phase-change disk data storage

摘要

In optical disk data storage, it is essential to control the sources of noise in order to achieve high signal to noise ratio (SNR) and eventually a low byte error rate. There are several major types of noise in optical recording: thermal, shot, laser, media and writing noise. Here, we separate various noises for phase-change (PC) disks and analyze the media noise in some detail. It is shown that the media noise, which corresponds to about 1% fluctuations of the disk reflection coefficient, is the limiting factor for high SNR if one uses the sum detection scheme in the data channel.