Techniques are provided for identifying the servo sectors in a track on a data storage device. A data storage device identifies the servo sectors in a track by reading distributed index bits from multiple servo sectors in a track. The data storage device analyzes only one index bit from each servo sector to identify the index of a track. In some embodiments, the index of a track can be identified after examining the index bits stored in a particular number of consecutive servo sectors, even in the presence of errors. The index bits in each track can have an error tolerance with a minimum Hamming distance greater than one. In other embodiments, a data storage device compares a sliding window of the index bits read from the servo sectors to all possible N-bit vectors that exist within a pattern of the index bits stored on a track.