A disc drive includes a transducer having a separate element for writing information and a separate element for reading information to and from the disc. In a disc drive designated to read and write long sequential records, the track misregistration budget is reduced to account for previously written tracks not being encroached on one side. An initial track is written. Subsequent tracks are written after a seek in one direction. The subsequent track is written so that the initially written track is overwritten to one side and leaves a track having a width substantially equal to the width of the read element. Records can be written into data bands of a selected number of tracks. A guard band is left between groups of data bands so that data on tracks in subsequent data bands are not overwritten.