Dr. Yichun Fan
Sr. Staff Engineer
Advanced Technology Development, Seagate Technology
Date & Time: 14:00 - 15:00, July 22nd (Tue), 2025.
Place: 8F Middle Conference Room, Main Bldg., Sengen.
Review of HDD-HAMR on recording head architectures, recording physics, and materials challenges
Dr. Yichun Fan
Sr. Staff Engineer
Advanced Technology Development, Seagate Technology
Abstract:
The demand for data storage has been experiencing an exponential growth, fueled by human genomics, smart factory, smart city, autonomous vehicles, etc. Such demand is projected to reach 175 zetta byte in 2025, over 65% of which will be stored in Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). This drives the HDDs community to put continuous efforts to break records of recording density to reduce costs of massive data storage. To shrink the storage gain size, high uniaxial magnetic anisotropy energy of L10 ordered granular FePt is utilized to overcome the thermal stability challenge. However, it raises another challenge to switch such magnetically hard material since the high coercivity exceeds the saturated magnetic field from the available commercialized writer materials, which is referred as areal density trilemma. Therefore, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) has been developed by introducing near-field heating to soften the recording material to enable switching by magnetic writer pole. It has been successfully commercialized in 2024.