Analysis and design of shingled magnetic recording systems

Abstract

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is an upcoming technology that will extend the life of conventional granular magnetic recording (CGMR). SMR differs from conventional recording in that the tracks are written in a raster scan format, in one direction only, leaving tracks that are overlapped like the shingles on a roof. This simple change means that adjacent track overwrite only occurs from one side, and tracks need to survive this overwrite only once. In contrast, conventional recording needs to survive thousands of overwrites from both sides. This work performs analysis of SMR from three perspectives. First, an analysis of how much gain one might expect for SMR based on the assumptions for the magnetic write width (MWW), magnetic read width (MRW), and erase bandwidth (EBW) is performed. Second, this analysis is corroborated via simulated 747 curves using the grain flipping probability (GFP) model. The third part validates the 747 curves from the model with results from the spinstand.