  The error pattern correcting code (EPCC) can be constructed to provide a
syndrome decoding table targeting the dominant error events of an inter-symbol
interference channel at the output of the Viterbi detector. For the size of the
syndrome table to be manageable and the list of possible error events to be
reasonable in size, the codeword length of EPCC needs to be short enough.
However, the rate of such a short length code will be too low for hard drive
applications. To accommodate the required large redundancy, it is possible to
record only a highly compressed function of the parity bits of EPCC's tensor
product with a symbol correcting code. In this paper, we show that the proposed
tensor error-pattern correcting code (T-EPCC) is linear time encodable and also
devise a low-complexity soft iterative decoding algorithm for EPCC's tensor
product with q-ary LDPC (T-EPCC-qLDPC). Simulation results show that
T-EPCC-qLDPC achieves almost similar performance to single-level qLDPC with a
1/2 KB sector at 50% reduction in decoding complexity. Moreover, 1 KB
T-EPCC-qLDPC surpasses the performance of 1/2 KB single-level qLDPC at the same
decoder complexity.
