A novel textured design for hard disk tribology improvement

Abstract

A novel textured design with characteristics of low glide avalanche, low stiction and long wear durability has been studied. The novel textured design contains a normal laser process and mechanical texture process. The first step was to create the conventional crater circular laser bump, the second step was to modify the bump shape using different sizes of texture slurry. The mechanical texture consists of three-stage process from grinding bump rim to flatting bump rim. This novel bump design has large volume and small curvature of bump rim to minimize the level of impact between head and disk. The new design also has high roughness of bump rims to reduce the contact area of interface, and the grooves of the texture line on the bump rim providing paths to improve the reflow of lube. We have shown that the new design has the lower stiction, longer wear durability, less lube degradation and carbon overcoat wear, less probability of tipping occurrence and lower glide avalanche than that of the conventional design.