Status Report: Perpendicular Contact Recording on Rigid Media

Abstract

In recent years, efforts in the industry to reduce head/media spacing loss and increase areal recording density, for the most part, have been directed toward reducing the size and mass of air bearing sliders to enable very low flying height. An alternative to this strategy aims at operating ultra low mass heads in continuous sliding contact with the media. This paper, will summarize the progress that has been achieved at Censtor Corp. over the past several years in this latter approach to extending recording density, which is now being implemented in small form factor disk drive designs.