Understanding and mitigation of scratch induced magnetic damage in perpendicular recording media

Hard disk drives (HDDs) are among the most widely used information storage components in these digital times, since they were commercialized in late 1970s. The perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) media using (CoCrPt)_x(Metal Oxide)_1-x magnetic alloys have reached an areal density of 700GB/in2 and beyond[1]. The current researches focus on achieving higher grain refinement and increasing uniaxial magnetocrystalline anisotropy and so on [2] to improve signal-to-noise ratio. Mechanical reliability is also one of key important properties to be considered for the recording media design [3].