Applied Magnetics Corp says it is now shipping pilot production quantities of high-performance thin-film magnetoresistive tape heads for use in quarter-inch cartridge tape drives based on the QIC-2100C standard, which store up to 2.1Gb per cartridge without data compression or use of extended-length tape: the Goleta, California company claims that these are the first tape heads for a QIC drive to use thin-film magnetoresistive technology, which it says is expected to become an industry standard over the next few years; the single-track heads feature a thin-film inductive section for writing to the tape and advanced magnetoresistive read sections for reading data from the tape and are assembled in a read-write-read configuration for reading data immediately after writing, regardless of tape direction.
