Impact of write equalization on high-density particulate recording systems

Write equalization (WE), used extensively in tape recording systems, has offered many improvements to the recording channel. These include improved resolution, better overwrite, and reduced distortion. As linear density in these systems has increased with the use of thinner metal-particle (MP) media, which significantly improves read nonlinearity in magnetoresistive (MR) heads, it is not clear that the effects of the WE scheme are still advantageous. In this paper, the impact that WE has on high-density advanced particulate recording systems is investigated. It is found that surface roughness is much more detrimental to recordings using WE because of the higher frequency behavior and reduced channel output of the recording scheme.