Recording at 300 kfci with perpendicular Co-alloy multilayers

Using a merged MR head with novel CoB/Pt multilayers, various magnetic and recording properties were measured and compared with a commercial longitudinal media disk. At high frequency, about 3 dB of integrated SNR improvement was found compared with the longitudinal disk. Recording non-linearities, such as non-linear transition shift and partial erasure were also found to be smaller. Using various PRML channels, error rates below 1/spl times/10/sup -7/ was achieved at low linear densities. The error rate began to degrade at 300 kfci. Using an EPR4 channel, a raw error rate of 4/spl times/10/sup -4/ was obtained at 350 kbpi with a data late of 60 Mbits/sec.