Drive-based recording analyses at >800 Gfc/in2 using shingled recording

Since the introduction of perpendicular recording, conventional perpendicular scaling has enabled the hard disk drive industry to deliver products ranging from ∼130 to well over 500 Gb/in2 in a little over 4 years. The incredible areal density growth spurt enabled by perpendicular recording is now endangered by an inability to effectively balance writeability with erasure effects at the system level. Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) offers an effective means to continue perpendicular areal density growth using conventional heads and tuned media designs. The use of specially designed edge-write head structures (also known as 'corner writers') should further increase the AD gain potential for shingled recording. In this paper, we will demonstrate the drive-based recording performance characteristics of a shingled recording system at areal densities in excess of 800 Gb/in2 using a conventional head. Using a production drive base, developmental heads/media and a number of sophisticated analytical routines, we have studied the recording performance of a shingled magnetic recording subsystem. Our observations confirm excellent writeability in excess of 400 ktpi and a perpendicular system with acceptable noise balance, especially at extreme ID and OD skews where the benefits of SMR are quite pronounced. We believe that this demonstration illustrates that SMR is not only capable of productization, but is likely the path of least resistance toward production drive areal density closer to 1 Tb/in2 and beyond. - Research highlights: → Drive-based recording demonstrations at 805 Gf/in2 has been demonstrated using both 95 and 65 mm drive platforms at roughly 430 ktpi and 1.87 Mfci. → Limiting factors for shingled recording include side reading, which is dominated by the reader crosstrack skirt profile, MT10 being a representative metric. → Media jitter and associated DC media SNR further limit areal density, dominated by crosstrack transition curvature, downtrack transition length and media exchange coupling parameters. → Drive track misregistration (TMR) was also observed to be a dominant factor in the ultimate areal density capability of these drive systems with OD performance degrading strongly vs measurements made at the ID. → The ultimate potential for commercialization of SMR drive systems will be gated by success in control of these dominating factors.