A system implements adaptive desaturation for the min-sum decoding of LDPC codes. Specifically, when an-above threshold proportion of messages from check nodes to variable nodes (CN-to-VN messages) are saturated to a maximum fixed-precision value, all CN-to-VN messages are halved. This facilitates the saturation of correct messages and boosts error correction over small trapping sets. The adaptive desaturation approach reduces the error floor by orders of magnitudes with negligible add-on circuits.