Abstract: The recording medium according to the invention has a magnetic recording layer, an exchange coupling layer and an enhancement or bias layer with an anisotropy orthogonal to the recording layer. The enhancement layer is designed to have no significant remanent magnetization and preferably to saturate under the write head. The enhancement layer creates an exchange field normal to the anisotropy of the recording layer and has the effect of rotating the magnetization of the recording layer and lowering the required switching field, i.e., the coercivity. The invention can be embodied in a longitudinal recording medium or a perpendicular recording medium. The exchange coupling can either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic. The bias layer has a high KuV and anisotropy and is designed to have high thermal stability and minimize the rotation of magnetization with the head field.

Abstract: The invention uses an upper and lower magnetic layer of a laminated magnetic layer structure that includes an AF spacer layer that results in weak antiferromagnetic coupling of the magnetic layers that is insufficient to cause either of the layers to switch so that the magnetic orientations of the two ferromagnetic layers remain parallel. An advantage of the invention is that the AF-coupling tends to anti-correlate the noise in the two layers. The weak AF coupling according to the invention is believed to act at the transition boundaries in the media to cause some of the noise domains to be oriented antiparallel and the noise to be less correlated than would be the case without the AF coupling and thereby to achieve improved SNR.

Abstract: An embodiment of the invention is a magnetic head with overlaid lead pads that contact the top surface of the sensor between the hardbias structures and do not contact the hardbias structures which are electrically insulated from direct contact with the sensor. The lead pad contact area on the top of the sensor is defined by sidewall deposition of a conductive material to form leads pads on a photoresist prior to formation of the remainder of the leads. The conductive material for the lead pads is deposited at a shallow angle to maximize the sidewall deposition on the photoresist, then ion-milled at a high angle to remove the conductive material from the field while leaving the sidewall material. An insulation layer is deposited on the lead material at a high angle, then milled at a shallow angle to remove insulation from the sidewall.

Abstract: An embodiment of the invention is a slider with a lift pad and a thermal protrusion pad in which the heads are located. The lift pad is located immediately in front of the thermal protrusion pad and is designed to achieve the flying characteristics needed for normal operation of the disk drive. The thermal protrusion pad includes a heater which is used to protrude the pad for burnishing-on-demand and/or for thermal fly-height control. The thermal protrusion pad is designed to generate very little lift so that protruding the thermal protrusion pad does not significantly increase the lift experienced by the slider. An alternative embodiment uses two overcoat thicknesses on the ABS surface with the thermal protrusion pad having a thin overcoat and the lift pad having a thicker overcoat.

Abstract: A magnetic head (slider) which requires no lapping is described. The head is fabricated with an air bearing surface that is parallel to the wafer surface. The saw cuts used to separate the individual sliders from the rest of the wafer are perpendicular to the air-bearing surface and do not pass through any critical features. The read and write components are formed from thin films disposed parallel to the air bearing surface and can be side-by-side or tandem in relation to the recording track. The stripe height of the read sensor is controlled by the deposition process rather than by lapping. Various embodiments of the read head include contiguous junction biasing, external hard magnet biasing, and in-stack biasing. In one embodiment a permeable field collector is included below the sensor layer structure. An aperture shield surrounding the sensor at the ABS is included in one embodiment.

Abstract: An intelligent disk drive is described which includes means for executing distributed computing tasks including a CPU and associated memory. The communication interface with the host computer is modified to allow the host computer to send executable code for a task to the drive and to allow the drive to communicate the results and status information about the task to the host computer. A method of organizing data for distributed processing in the intelligent disk drive is described which utilizes physical placement of the data around the rotating disk to optimize the execution of the task. In one embodiment head switching is used as further optimization in a disk drive having a plurality of heads to implement alternatives in the task program. In another embodiment, the intelligent disk drive has means for reading from at least one or more heads simultaneously while writing to another head.

Abstract: A magnetic transducer with selected elements recessed from the surface of the transducer is disclosed. The magnetic sensor element is recessed below its surrounding gap material and the second shield (S2) is preferably recessed below the level of the gap material. Recessing the selected elements below the surrounding ceramic material, results in superior resistance to physical distortion resulting from the action of the moving magnetic media. Applicant discloses two methods for producing magnetic transducers with recessed elements according to the invention. One method uses a lapping medium which chemically etches the selected material more aggressively than the surrounding material resulting in the selected material being recessed from the surface of the transducer. For transducers in which the magnetic sensor element and the second (S2) are made from alloys of nickel and iron, an acidic lapping medium is preferred to achieve the desired structure.