Demonstration of High-Density Removable Disk System Using Barium-Ferrite Particulate and CoPtCr-SiO$_2$Thin Film Flexible Media

To make removable, flexible disk drives (FDDs) a practical solution for modern backup, archiving, and data sharing, current areal density capabilities must be improved. In this paper, we study prototype drive-level performance of two types of flexible media. Using giant magneto-resistive heads, a partial-response maximum-likelihood channel, and a robust error-correction coding scheme, we evaluated signal-to-noise ratios, byte-error rates, pulse widths, and off-track read capabilities for each media type. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of FDD areal densities at 17.5 Gb/in
²
using barium-ferrite particulate media, and 31 Gb/in
²
using CoPtCr-SiO
₂
sputtered media