Skew angle and off-track capability of near contact recording systems

Various sliders for near-contact recording systems have begun to appear in high areal density disk drives. In this paper, systematic investigations were conducted to evaluate the effects of skew angle on off-track capability of near-contact recording systems. Tri-pad sliders were used in the investigations. The spacings between read/write elements and disk surface were in the range of 0.6/spl sim/1.2 /spl mu/in. The off-track capability is reduced and the noise level of residual signal after overwriting is increased, when skew angle is increased. A large skew angle also makes the off-track capability asymmetric and sensitive to off-track direction. However, increased skew angle reduces the track-to-track interference in the writing operation.