Shingled Magnetic Recording Using HAMR Technology

The two writing architectures that are primarily employed in modern magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) storage devices are conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Although SMR offers higher areal density capability (ADC) compared with CMR, it compromises random access write/read performance. Furthermore, the two main writing processes that are used in hard disk drives are heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and flux control microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR). These two writing processes are completely different from each other, with the HAMR method offering higher ADC than MAMR. In this work, we compare ADC between CMR and SMR using FC-MAMR and HAMR drives. Since ADC gain is almost the same in FC-MAMR and HAMR in our design, the highest capacity is found to be achieved using HAMR-based SMR drives.