CAPABILITY OF A MAGNETIC RECORDING SYSTEM AS A FUNCTION OF TRACK WIDTH.

Abstract

Summary form only given. Recent interest in the information-theoretic capacity of the magnetic recording channel has focused on the capacity of a single magnetic track of a given, fixed width. The authors allow the recording surface to be divided into an arbitrary number of tracks. The track width is chosen to maximize the total storage capacity. The optimum width depends on the way the signal and noise scale with track width. Under assumptions that are approprate to some current magnetic recording systems, it is shown that the total capacity would be sustantially increased by the use of much narrower tracks. This analysis ignores the considerable engineering difficulties in constructing such high-track-density systems, but it serves to emphasize the need for work in that direction.