Greater than 13 Gb/in/sup 2/ spin valve heads

Here we report the performance, structure, and characteristics of a merged read/write spin valve head that achieves an areal read/write density of 13.5 Gb/in2 at a data transfer rate of 23 MB/sec. The readers are dual spin valve sensors [1] with synthetically pinned layers[2]. The Writers are conventional inductive beads with their pole geometry defined by focused ion beam (FIB) technology. The merged read/write heads were tested with optimized low noise disks and the results of those studies arc reported below.