An effort has been made to evaluate disk drive components at high data rates. Fully functional write-head/media components to 2.6 Gbit/s have been demonstrated in spin-stand testing and magnetic force microscopy characterizations. In addition, the drive front-end electronics examined possess complete functionality up to 4.0 Gbit/s without significant performance degradation, which is consistent with electric modeling results. Furthermore, our experimental data clearly indicate that the pre-amp’s performance at high frequency is becoming a limiting factor to achieving an ultrahigh data rate in present write-head/media designs. The magnetic moment on write gap edges for certain recording heads shows signs of becoming insensitive to following the write current switching speed at ultrahigh frequency.