IBM Corp said yesterday that scientists at its Almaden Research Center, San Jose have developed the world’s most sensitive sensor for detecting data on magnetic disks. They expect it to go into drives by the turn of the century and will enable them to store information some 20 times more densely than is possible today – at 10G-bits per per square inch of disk surface. Called a spin-valve head, the new sensor applies the giant magnetoresistive effect, which was discovered less than six years ago; it has already been demonstrated reading data at 1G-bits per square inch. It says the spin valve’s electrical signal – one microVolt per micron of track width, exceeds today’s best magnetoresistive sensor by five times.
