State-of-the-art magnetic hard disk drives

Magnetic recording has progressed dramatically over the last 50 years, with an increase of almost eight orders of magnitude in the amount of information stored per unit area of disk space. Two key enablers of this progress have been the recording medium and the read-back head. This article reviews the current state of the art in multilayer thin-film longitudinal recording media and giant magnetoresistive (GMR) read heads, with particular emphasis on the nanostructured magnetic materials that are key to today's high-performance hard disk drives.