This book is designed to give the student a fundamental, in-depth understanding of all the essential features of the magnetic recording process for both high density disk and tape recording. The book provides a thorough grounding in four basic areas of magnetic recording: structure and fields of heads and media, the replay process, the recording process, and medium noise analysis. Besides the fundamental issues, key systems questions of nonlinearities, overwrite, side track phenomena, error rate estimates as well as comparisons of MR and inductive heads will be discussed. The student will be...