Applied Magnetics Corp announced from its Goleta, California headquarters that has started delivering samples of second-generation thin-film magnetoresistive disk heads to OEM customers: the company says the new heads offer considerable performance advantages over currently produced thin-film inductive heads and will provide the basis for significantly higher data storage capacity, yet increasingly smaller disk drives in the future – but we’ll have to wait a bit – volume production is not due to start until late next year; they can handle areal densities of over 300M-bits per square inch where IBM Corp, using first generation heads and generally regarded as the leader right now, is only up to densities of 150M-bits per square inch; where inductive heads use a single transducing element to read and to write, magnetoresistive heads use two separately optimised elements, an inductive write element and a magnetoresistive element for reads; they are also velocity-independent.
