A narrow track MR head for high density tape recording

In this work, the performance of a narrow track MR head/MP tape recording system was evaluated focusing on the MR head saturation. Readback density of 0.65 Gbits/in/sup 2/ was attained with reasonable SNR of 18.2 dB using a 5 /spl mu/m trackwidth MR head and thin layer MP tape. Saturation at low densities was suppressed by the selection of a run length limited 8/10 modulation code. This result suggests that the excellent performance of the narrow track MR head could increase areal density in tape recording, and would steer the development of particulate tape media toward reduction of magnetization thickness product and improvement of media noise characteristics.