To improve the recording performance of magnetic media on a glass substrate, we have investigated the effect of coating a glass substrate with additional thin reactive films before sputtering conventional Cr and Co alloy films. NiP/sub 3/, TiSi/sub 2/, Cr, or C were used for reactive layers. With a proper reactive layer, the optimized glass substrate media had a coercivity equivalent to textured Al substrate media and noise lower than Al textured media. Macromagnetic performance and read-write performance were evaluated. The correlation of magnetic performance with film microstructure was determined using XRD, TEM, and AFM characterization techniques.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>