Optimization of an aerial density capability (ADC) leveraging different qualities of media surfaces to which sub-portions of an encoded data portion are written. That is, data may be encoded to generate an encoded data portion according to a coding scheme. In turn, the encoded data portion may be divided into a plurality of sub-portions, each of which may be written to different media surfaces in a storage drive. The sub-portions may be read from the different media surfaces and combined to generate a recreated encoded data portion that is decoded using the coding scheme. As the encoded data portion is divided into sub-portions, the combined sub-portions may provide different error rates or signal-to-noise ratios that may allow for lower quality sub-portions to be assisted during the decoding process by higher quality sub-portions.