Milpitas, California-based Read-Rite Corp, regarded by some observers as one of the hottest investment properties in the disk drive arena, has begun first customer shipments of its latest thin film heads for Winchester disk drives. The new Nanoslider heads are half the size of the company’s Minislider, and should enable designers to increase capacities to at least double those possible with the Minislider by making better use of the disk surface, reducing the flying height and packing in more platters per drive. The Nanoslider head measures 0.063 wide by 0.080 long by 0.017 high. The currently available configuration has a seven micron track width, enabling approximately 2,700 data tracks to be written on each inch of disk radius. It flies 3 millionths of an inch above the disk surface and packs 50,000 flux reversals per inch of track for a data density of over 175m bits per square inch of disk surface. The initial Nanoslider has 42 coil turns in a high efficiency transducer that is suited to drives below 2 in diameter. No indication of prices given.
