Wear study for dual-heater slider under high temperature

With the continuous increase of a hard disk drive (HDD) areal density, the required clearance between a magnetic head and a disk is lower than 1 nm. The HDD's reliability becomes a significant concern due to the inevitable contact of an intermittent/continuous head-disk contact. Slider wear is one of the most important topics. This paper investigated the slider wear at a near-contact/contact region under high temperature based on a drive-based tester. Based on the slider wear identification results using the scanning electron microscope and atomic force microscope (AFM), it is concluded that a slider with higher temperature is prone to produce more wear to slider. Furthermore, a modified wear model, which implies that wear occurs through an atom-atom attrition process (bond breaking) at nanoscale, was used to fit the wear data measured using AFM. Such bond breaking can be described by a thermally activated process that indicates wear amount is highly related to temperature and it agrees well with the experiments.