The trend of increasing storage densities results in growing sensitivity of system performance to variations of storage channel parameters. To counteract these variations, more adaptivity is needed in the data receiver. Accurate tracking of rapid variations is limited by latencies in the adaptation loops. These latencies are largely governed by delays of the bit detector. In two-dimensional storage systems, data are packaged in a group of adjacent tracks or rows, and for some of the rows the detection delays can increase dramatically with respect to one-dimensional systems. As a result, the effective latencies in the adaptation loops preclude the tracking of rapid variations and really limit the performance of the system. In this paper, a scheme is proposed that overcomes this problem and that can be used for timing recovery, automatic gain control, and other adaptive circuits. Rapid variations for all the rows are tracked using control information from rows for which detector latency is smallest. This works properly if rapid variations are common across the rows as is the case, for example, for the two-dimensional optical storage (TwoDOS) system. Experimental results for TwoDOS confirm that the scheme yields improved performance with respect to conventional adaptation scheme
