Improved recording performance using side-shielded pole head in PMR drive

A recording performance for the side shielded pole head (SSPH) with trapezoidal pole tip is compared to a conventional single pole head (CSPH) with the SiO/sub 2/ dispersed double-layered perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) media. The SSPH showed 3 dB higher SNR, 22.5% enhanced D/sub 50/, and about 10 dB better NLTS compared to the CSPH design. Noise analysis showed the SSPH had lower noise than the CSPH. The lower transition noise and better NLTS is attributed to reduction of transition jitter in SSPH. The perpendicular magnetic recording drive having a storage capacity of 80 GB/platter has been successfully demonstrated with SSPH. Finally, the on-track bit-error rate (BER) measured for 10 sectors of a linear density of 653.2 kb/in at 7200 rpm was about 10 /spl times/ 10/sup -6.7/ for the SSPH design, about two orders improvement over the CSPH design.