Achieving on Particulate Barium Ferrite Tape

The fundamental areal density limits of particulate tape media are investigated with micromagnetic simulations and a one-dimensional recording model, adapted to three-dimensional particle orientation distributions. It is shown that the viability of the particulate technology for tape systems continues well beyond the current 3 Gb/in2 and that 100 Gb/in2 could be obtained by simple optimization of the particle size, magnetic properties and distributions. We demonstrate that a particulate medium that uses 750 nm3 oriented particles having BaFe12O19 bulk magnetic properties could be optimally recorded with a ring-type writer and a reasonable deep-gap field of 16 kOe. With a 150 nm combined tracking margin and for a conservative BB-SNR requirement of 19 dB as used in current tape systems, we determine that such particulate medium would support an areal density of 78 Gb/in2. With the expected improvements in coding and signal processing, we predict that the same particulate medium would achieve areal densities above 100 Gb/in2.