1. A method for interfacing a mass storage medium with a computing system, the method comprising: receiving data from the computing system, wherein the received data comprises a search command; processing the received data using a programmable logic device, the processing comprising determining a key from the search command; writing the determined key onto the mass storage medium; reading the written key from the mass storage medium, wherein the read key comprises an analog read signal for the key; reading a stream of data from the mass storage medium, wherein the read data stream comprises an analog read signal for the data stream; and manipulating the stream of data read from the mass storage medium using the programmable logic device, wherein the step of manipulating the stream of data comprises performing an approximate match operation on the stream of data, wherein the approximate match operation performing step comprises comparing the read key with a sliding window of the data stream to thereby identify whether an approximate match exists between the read key and the data stream by sampling the analog read signal for the key at a high rate, sampling the analog read signal for the data stream at a high rate, and performing the comparison between the key and the data stream on the samples resulting from the sampling steps.