Different designs and limits of longitudinal magnetic recording media

Combining antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) and laminated media (LM), we were able to incorporate the stability of AFC media with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of LM. This improvement is directly related to the decrease of the demagnetization field which is calculated to be up to 50% of the LM case for some configurations of AFC+LM that were experimentally realized. The stabilization layer also increases the magnetic energy barrier of the recording layers in the AFC+LM structure, which further improves the stability of this media. An improvement of ∼1 dB in SNR was observed in AFC+LM in comparison to single layer media.