This review paper provides a survey of material development of perpendicular recording (or perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR) as it relates to the ‘areal density’ of hard disk drives (HDDs) with high amounts of
information stored per unit area. Conventional longitudinal recording has reached its limits in terms of increasing the areal density. Hence, perpendicular recording promises to achieve high areal density, which is the current goal for both the academic and industrial sectors. Development of perpendicular recording can be considered in terms of the 3 primary parts of HDDs: the medium, write head and read head. Experimentation
and computer simulations were used to optimize the parameters for improving the areal density of HDDs.