Skew angle effects in shingled magnetic recording system with double/triple reader head array

Abstract

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is a scheme used to extend the life of the current perpendicular magnetic recording technology. SMR enables writing narrow tracks with a wide writer. Currently, SMR employs a single reader and will suffer inter-track interference (ITI) as the tracks become comparable in width to the reader. ITI can be mitigated by using narrower readers; however, narrower readers suffer from increased reader noise. Another approach to combat ITI is to process 2D readback and use ITI cancellation schemes to retrieve the data track. Multiple readbacks can be obtained either with a single reader and multiple revolutions or with a reader array. The former suffers from increased readback latency. In this work, we focus on the latter. When using a reader array, the skew angle poses major challenges. During writing, there is increased adjacent track erasure, and during readback the effective reader pitch varies and there is an increase in the 2D intersymbol interference caused by the rotated reader profile. In this work, we run micromagnetic simulations at different skew angles to train the grain flipping probability model, and then evaluate raw bit channel error rate performance at skew. In particular, we investigate the performance degradation caused by skewing of the 2 or 3 read head array for various read-head geometries.