CONTACT PERPENDICULAR RECORDING ON RIGID MEDIA

Significant enhancement of recording performance on rigid media can be achieved by reducing the head/media separation to that of continuous sliding contact. However, this may require a fundamental departure from convention in the design and manufacture of head/suspension structures. We describe here integrated head/flexure structures which have an effective mass of about 300-mu-g, evidence no indication of head crash and hold the potential for very low wear of both head and media, when operating in continuous sliding contact at media velocities of 15 m/s or greater. A perpendicular probe type transducer is constructed as an integral part of a thin dielectric flexure. Initial recording performance on two-layer perpendicular media indicates promise for achieving very high linear and track densities, and the extremely small mass facilitates the design of servo systems and actuators capable of substantially reducing track access time.