Book excerpt: Magnetic recording is presently a $50 billion industry. It spans audio, video, and digi tal applications in the form of tapes and disks. The industry is expected to grow by a factor of five or more in the next decade. This growth will be accompanied by dramatic improvements in the technology, and the potential exists for magnetic-recording den sities to improve by at least one order of magnitude! Magnetic-recording process is accomplished by relative motion between a mag netic head and a magnetic medium. Types of magnetic media for digital recording are: flexible media (tapes and floppy disks) and rigid disks. Physical contact between head and medium occurs during starts and stops and hydrodynamic air film develops at high speeds. Hying heights (mean separation between head and medium) are on the order of 0. 1 micrometer comparable to surface roughness of the mating members. Need for higher and higher recording densities requires that surfaces be as smooth as possible and flying heights be as low as possible. Smoother surfaces lead to increased static/ kinetic friction and wear. In the case of magnetic tapes, in order to have high bit capac ity for a given size of a spool, we like to use as thin a tape substrate as possible. Thinner tapes are prone to local or bulk viscoelastic deformation during storage. This may lead to variations in head-tape separations resulting in problems in data reliability.