Radius and Skew Effects in an HAMR Hard Disk Drive

Over the past year, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) has continued to make significant progress toward production and remains the most promising technology to enable areal density growth beyond 1 Tb/in2. In this paper, we present an experimental study on the effects of disk radius and head skew angle in a HAMR hard disk drive. We demonstrate the dependence of laser power on disk radius and the sensitivities to several additional factors that can potentially change that characteristic. We also contrast adjacent track interference and areal density capability performance in drive to conventional perpendicular recording and their respective sensitivities to radius and skew angle.