Magnetic recording demonstration over 100 Gb/[in.sup.2]

A real density growth has enabled hard disk drives to continually fulfill the demands from new enterprise, desktop, and consumer applications. The demonstration of 100 Gb/[in.sup.2] is another milestone that was achieved recently and is described in this paper. The recording demonstration employed fully integrated magnetic recording heads and thermally stable multilayer antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media through a commercially available channel chip. At a track density of 149 ktpi and linear density of 680 kbpi, the achieved off-track capability with 5% track squeeze was 10% of the track pitch, while maintaining a raw bit-error rate (BER) of [10.sup.-4] or better. This yielded an areal density of 101 Gb/[in.sup.2] with measured on-track raw BER of 5 x [10.sup.-5]. Index Terms--Disk drives, magnetic heads, magnetic recording, system analysis and design.