Magnetic recording technology-advances through the year 2000 and beyond

Magnetic hard disk drives have become the dominant storage technology for information processing and have been applied in such diverse applications as servers for large enterprise computers to desktop and mobile personal computers. This product has been the recipient of significant technology innovations as magnetoresistive sensors, advanced thin film disks and high performance PRML data channels. The result has been areal density increases at 60% per year and commensurate price per megabyte reductions. The industry average drive capacity is 4 gigabytes for the year 1998. To maintain this rapid progress throughout the next decade, giant magnetoresistive sensors and supersmooth thin film disks are being employed. The effects of superparamagnetism are addressed by innovations considered evolutionary in this technology progress.