An electrically resistive heater in a data storage system is formed of a chemically disordered Cr_xV_100-x alloy. The alloy exhibits a high temperature coefficient of resistance (T_CR) so that the heater temperature can be inferred from its resistance, minimal resistance vs. temperature hysteresis upon heating and cooling, a high melting point, and temporal stability of resistance at elevated temperatures. The resistive heater is used in data storage systems, including magnetic recording hard disk drives that uses heaters to thermally assist the recording or induce protrusion of the write head pole tips to reduce the head-disk spacing, and atomic force microscopy (AFM) based systems that use "nanoheaters" on cantilever tips for either thermally-assisted recording on magnetic media or thermo-mechanical recording on polymer-based media.