  Motivated by the concept of probe storage, we study the problem of
information retrieval using a large array of N nano-mechanical probes, N ~
4000. At the nanometer scale it is impossible to avoid errors in the
positioning of the array, thus all signals retrieved by the probes of the array
at a given sampling moment are affected by the same amount of random position
jitter. Therefore a massively parallel probe storage device is an example of a
noisy communication channel with long range correlations between channel
outputs due to the global positioning errors. We find that these correlations
have a profound effect on the channel's properties. For example, it turns out
that the channel's information capacity does approach 1 bit per probe in the
limit of high signal-to-noise ratio, but the rate of the approach is only
polynomial in the channel noise strength. Moreover, any error correction code
with block size N >> 1 such that codewords correspond to the instantaneous
outputs of the all probes in the array exhibits an error floor independently of
the code rate. We illustrate this phenomenon explicitly using Reed-Solomon
codes the performance of which is easy to simulate numerically. We also discuss
capacity-achieving error correction codes for the global jitter channel and
their complexity.
