A novel external clocking magnetic disk recording channel is proposed and examined. Timing not only for data recovery but for recording is given by a bit clock which is synchronized with dedicated clock marks on patterned discrete track media. Jitter of the bit clock is 2.5 ns (rms), which is good enough for data rates up to about 20 Mbit/s. Using an MR/Inductive head and PRML (Partial Response Maximum Likelihood) signal processing, an error rate of 110-6 is obtained at linear density 3146 bit/mm.