High density magnetic recording on highly oriented CoCr-alloy perpendicular rigid disk media

High density magnetic recording is investigated for a combination of single-layered perpendicular media and ring-type heads. Medium magnetic properties (Hc and Mr/Ms) are improved by introducing a dual underlayer structure. Read/write experiments show that the linear recording resolution (D-50) increases drastically with decreasing the magnetic spacing. D-50 values of 190 - 220 kFCI are observed using a flying MR head at an estimated magnetic spacing of 40 nm. Using contact recording, even higher resolution of D-50*=300 kFCI is confirmed. Side-writing and side-erasing can be reduced below 0.2 mu m by employing a narrow gap write head with trimmed sharp track edge, which shows a possibility of track density greater than 25 kTPI. The recording areal density, thus, can be increased to 10 Gb/in(2) level with the present recording system.