Readback Characteristics of MR Head for Perpendicular Magnetic Recording

Abstract

We designed and fabricated some samples of the contact magnetoresistive/inductive heads that have recently been developed for perpendicular magnetic recording, and evaluated them with a double-layered hard disk. A shielded MR head with shield-to-shield spacing of 0.5μm had a high D₅₀ of 170 kFRPI at a relative velocity of 1 m/s. On the other hand, the low-density output of the unshielded MR head was larger than that of the shielded head. With an increase in the recording density, however, the output gradually decreased, becoming roughly equal to that of the shielded-type in the high-density region. Thus, both shield- ed-type and unshielded-type MR heads had a good highdensity characteristics in the contact state.