A novel early termination algorithm (ETA) is proposed for the serial low-complexity chase (LCC) Reed–Solomon (RS) decoder. It can terminate the decoding procedure after the reencoding step conditionally, which results in the improvement of the serial LCC decoders’ speed. The ETA will not degrade the decoding performance of RS codes; on the contrary, it can even improve that of short RS codes remarkably. The simulations of the ETA for (3125) and (255,239) RS codes over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and a (458,410) RS code over the EPR4 channel with 100% AWGN show that it is effective. Moreover, the hardware implementation of the early terminated LCC decoder for (458,410) and (255,239) RS codes is provided. The analysis shows that it can work faster than the previous serial LCC decoder with only a few extra hardware costs. It also shows great advantages in average throughput performance than the common pipelined LCC decoders, especially for relatively high Eb/N0 values, by an overall consideration of the area, speed, and decoding performance.