Martin Blaber

Head and Media Design for Curvature Reduction in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

Recording curvature in magnetic data-storage technology has long been one of the significant challenges impacting on recording performance. Despite curvature occurrence in the conventional recording techniques such as perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is demonstrated to induce much more severe curvature than PMR. HAMR curvature could cause poor bit error rate and limits the maximum areal density capacity. Here we have theoretically predicted and demonstrated various approaches for curvature reduction from the aspect of either altering the near-field transducer head design or recording medium design. Optical and thermal modeling have indicated that by utilizing a crown-shape peg to change the thermal source profile and compensate for thermal expansion and rounding effect, it could potentially improve curvature figure of merit (FOM) and achieve curvature reduction by ~45%. In terms of the recording media design, by altering the heat sink and internal layer media material or geometry, it could also achieve curvature cancellation of ~40% with increased thermal gradient. The combined approach from both HAMR head and media perspectives with balanced recording FOMs, could potentially realize significant curvature reduction to be of similar or better recording curvature level to PMR.

Heat assisted magnetic recording performance and integration challenges

Recent recording areal density and integrated drive performance demonstrations using Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) suggest that it is a viable technology to succeed conventional magnetic recording. However challenges still remain for the near field transducer, in particular reliability and sufficient thermal confinement. We explore a new NFT design, Near field Transducer Gap (NTG), which offers the potential to mitigate some of the issues in track confinement and thermal profile compared to earlier published studies [4]. The design offers efficiency improvements, and the potential to reduce unwanted background light and heating that can lead to erasure in the writing track, and neighbors.