Preliminary investigation for a cylindrical magnetic storage system

A cylindrical magnetic storage system was built and preliminary measurements were made. The system is expected to overcome the writing problems at high areal densities caused by write head skew angle and is aimed at the realization of 1 Tb/in/sup 2/ 2 Gb/s perpendicular magnetic recording. Cylindrical substrates, sputtering equipment, and a read/write tester for a cylindrical magnetic storage were fabricated. For this preliminary investigation, the length and diameter of the cylindrical substrates were 1 in. Thin films (protective layer, storage layer, seed layer, etc.) were deposited by rotating the cylindrical substrate during the sputtering process. Fundamental read/write characteristics were measured using an 8 mm video-taperecorder metal-in-gap head and a merged giant magnetoresistive head with a pico-slider.