Integration of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology into enterprise hard disk drives

Hard disk drive areal density growth has reduced the cost of data storage to pennies per gigabyte, but the super-paramagnetic limit is a looming potential impediment to the continuation of this growth. In order to overcome this obstacle, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology is being developed as a successor to conventional perpendicular magnetic recording. HAMR overcomes the super-paramagnetic limit by temporarily heating the media during the recording process. Heating the media magnetically “softens” it for recording, enabling the fields available from current generation writers to record data. As the media rotates away from the recording head, it quickly cools down to room temperature. This allows for the usage of high anisotropy materials in the recording layer, which are very stable at typical storage temperatures, enabling long-term data retention.