Perpendicular Interlaced Magnetic Recording

Abstract

Perpendicular magnetic recording is the current generation hard disk drive technology, which enables the continued and significant growth of large storage systems in data centers. There are currently two common architectures for the layout of tracks in perpendicular hard disk drives: conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR). In CMR, any track can be written at any time and neighboring tracks do not intentionally overlap. In SMR, the tracks are written sequentially in bands with the tracks intentionally overlapped like shingles on a roof. In this article, interlaced magnetic recording (IMR) architecture is applied with a perpendicular magnetic recording system. With Perpendicular Interlaced Magentic Recording (PIMR), we observed 2%–3% increase in areal density for single writer PIMR and 7%–20% increase in areal density for two writer PIMR over CMR whereas with SMR, we observed 19% increase in areal density over CMR.