Low stiction low glide height head-disk interface for high-performance disk drives (invited)

A brief historical review of the head-disk interface evolution is presented, and current limitations when facing stringent tribology requirements for high-density recording are addressed. The tribology performance of sliders with contact landing pads on the air bearing surfaces (the "padded slider'') was studied. Lightly mechanically textured disks, and laser zone-textured disks with shallow bumps (the "light LZT'') to reduce glide avalanche that were specially designed for padded sliders were used. When the smoother mechanically textured surface was applied, we observed inferior constant start-stop (CSS) durability due to possible tribological degradation of the padded slider, and significant landing pad wear was observed on the slider after the CSS test. Rougher surfaces including the light LZT surface, however, were not as sensitive to tribological degradation of the padded slider as the smoother surface, and exhibited better CSS durability as well as less landing pad wear after the test. Hence the optimization effort of padded slider head/disk component design may be reduced if a light texture is applied on the CSS zone. The head-disk interface consisting of a padded slider on a light LZT can better meet the stringent tribology requirements for high density recording needs and therefore it is proposed as an alternative to ramp loading technology in the desktop/server-class disk drives. Hence the better-understood CSS technology is expected to be further extended into future high-performance disk drives. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(99)31908-3].