Approaches to 100 Gbit/sq. in. recording density

A recording density of 10 Gbit/sq. in. is being pursued by a number of companies and universities in the National Storage Industry Consortium. It is widely accepted that this goal will be achieved in the laboratory within a few years. In this paper approaches to achieving 100 Gbit/sq. in. storage densities are considered. A major obstacle to continued scaling of magnetic recording to higher densities is that as the bit size is reduced, the grain size in the magnetic media must be reduced in order that media noise does not become so large that the signal to noise ratio (SNR) degrades sufficiently to make detection impossible. At 100 Gbit/sq. in., the bit size is only 0.006 square micrometers, which, in order to achieve 30 dB SNR, requires a grain size of about 2.5 nm. Such small grains are subject to thermal instability, and the recorded information will degrade over time unless the magnetic anisotropy of the materials used is increased significantly, or the media thickness is made much larger than expected on the basis of scaling today's longitudinal media thickness.