Intertrack Interference Mitigation on Staggered Bit-Patterned Media

One of the possible island distributions being considered for bit-patterned magnetic recording is a hexagonal array, leading to what is called staggered bit-patterned media. In this paper, we investigate the equalization techniques and bit error rate (BER) performance for two different recording methods on staggered media-namely, one array per track or single-track staggered media and two arrays per track or double-track staggered media. With single-track equalization, recording a track on two arrays may reduce intertrack interference (ITI) and outperform the single array per track recording. However, a new multitrack detection technique proposed recently can substantially mitigate ITI and dramatically change the BER performance of the two recording methods. Our investigation shows that by using this technique, the single-track staggered media can have better BER performance than double-track staggered media, even at very high areal densities.