Skew and corner angle induced erase band noise for shingled magnetic recording

The shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is considered to be a practical way to increase the areal densities (AD) to multi-Tera-bit/in² (Tb/in²) on conventional media [1]. Increasing the linear density and track density achieves higher AD, and erase band width (EBW) is one of the factors that affect track density [2]. However the erase band noise will be enhanced under the impact of the skew and corner angle of the shingled writing head because the SMR uses larger pole to write a series of overlapping tracks to achieve much stronger write field. The skew and corner angle from the air bearing surface (ABS) view is shown in Fig.1(a). In this paper, we designed different shingled writing head models with a variety of skew angles (SA) and corner angles (CA) to analyze the relationship between EBW and the angles using write-in error rate of adjacent bits. The results suggest that reducing the writing corner will be helpful to increase linear density and a moderate skew angle has positive effect for improving the writing gradient to reduce the erase band noise.