Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording Dependence on Reader for Conventional and Shingled Magnetic Recording

Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is the next generation hard disk drive technology which enables continued and significant areal density growth [1]. As the track pitch continues to scale down, the HAMR reader must continue to scale. The scalability of the current reader technology is greatly challenged at high track densities [2]-[3]. With significant growth in areal density, the reader width must reduce with high signal to noise ratio (SNR) to avoid side reading from adjacent tracks. Typically, there is a tradeoff between reader width and SNR [4]-[5]. For HAMR areal density to continue to scale, innovations to enable reader width reduction without SNR degradation are necessary. Traditional reader head media spacing (HMS) reduction and reader width scaling may not be enough to improve the reader resolution for high track pitches. In this paper, we compare the areal density capability (ADC) of HAMR Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) and HAMR Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) at various reader clearances with integrated HAMR readers and cross tested (CT) narrow high SNR readers.