Some of the information may still be useful to some readers, but keep in mind that some information may no longer be accurate. Product capabilities change, prices change, links may no longer work, and in fact, the company that makes this product may have gone down the tubes long ago. To get the latest, we recommend that you go to The Web Developer's Journal Home Page , and see if there is a more recent article about this subject. The data storage industry is on a perpetual quest to place the maximum amount of storage in the smallest size possible, and MR heads will become one of the important means to achieving new capacity and performance milestones towards this goal. MR heads have unique properties which make them especially useful for small form-factor drives, but can also be applied to achieve higher performance and greater capacity in larger disc drives.
Most disc drives built today use inductive thin-film recording heads.
In essence, these heads are similar to the recording head on an audio cassette player, where the read element of the head detects changes in the magnetic flux on the surface of the recording media. When an inductive thin-film head passes over a magnetic field, ft generates a minute signal which is subsequently amplified, filtered and converted into its digital representation by the electronics on the disc drive's circuit board. MR heads operate on a completely different physical phenomenon known as the magnetoresistive effect. Certain metals, when exposed to a magnetic field, change their resistance to the flow of electricity. This property is exploited in creating the read element of an MR head.