Data integrity evaluations of Reed Solomon codes for storage systems [solid state mass memories]

This paper introduces a very flexible approach for the evaluation of bit error rates (BER) attainable on storage systems which use Reed Solomon codes. These evaluations are based on the use of a Markov model to evaluate the probabilities of having an uncorrectable codeword. Differently from previous literature, the reported approach can take into account the impact of both erasures and random errors, allowing a smaller degree of approximation and better evaluation of BER improvement related to the introduction of scrubbing techniques. The flexibility of the proposed method is finally shown by applying it to different cases of interest.