Popcorn noise is a large transient noise spike at the reader shortly after writing due to unstable domains in writer yoke. The popcorn noise was found to dependent on write frequency. It is firstly reported that the popcorn noise occurred by the write instability of shielded-single-pole head (SSPH) can be captured in row-bar level QST which is experimentally confirmed. Thus, a PMR head can be rejected by the row-bar level QST. In addition, the writing stress traced by the MR transfer curve can possibly accelerate the head degradation.