ack MR Head for High

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/inz was attained with reasonable SNR of 18.2 dB using a 5 pm 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. I. INTRODUCTION Recent high areal recording density in rigid disk systems has been achieved with using narrow track magnetoresistive (MR) heads. MR heads have also been utilized in stationary- head tape recorders such as in the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) recorder, the Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC) tape drive and IBM 3490. Track density is much lower than that of the present rigid disk system due to the difficulty of narrow track following in the tape recording system. Narrow track MR heads, however, are supposed to play an important role in high density tape recording. In this paper, the performance of the narrow track MR headmetal particulate (MP) tape recording system is evaluated with regard to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) after equalization. In order to improve the SNR, control of MR head saturation in tape recording is indispensable. The effects of tape coating thickness, recorded depth and selection of channel coding will also be discussed.