Heat-Assisted Interlaced Magnetic Recording

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is the next generation hard disk drive technology that enables continued and significant areal density growth. There are currently two common architectures for the layout of tracks in hard disk drives: conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR). In CMR, any track can be written at any time and neighboring tracks do not intentionally overlap. In SMR, the tracks are written sequentially in bands with the tracks intentionally overlapping like shingles on a roof. In this paper, we introduce a novel track layout, interlaced magnetic recording (IMR), and apply it to a HAMR recording system. With heat-assisted IMR, we observed a 31% increase in areal density over HAMR CMR whereas in a HAMR SMR architecture, we observed a 27% increase in areal density over HAMR CMR.