Comparison of Recording Head Designs for Perpendicular and Exchange-Coupled Composite Media

Exchange-coupled composite (ECC) media consisting of hard and soft coupled regions has been predicted to exhibit attempt frequencies that are much larger than conventional perpendicular media due to the presence of two degrees of freedom. As a result, adjacent track erasure (ATE) and archivability are adversely affected, whereas writability is significantly enhanced due to thermal fluctuation assisted recording. Recording heads for ECC and perpendicular media, designed dimensionally for recording at 250 Gbits/In², are evaluated within this context. In comparison, recording on ECC media is shown to yield about a factor 2 advantage in areal density