Predicting the flying performance of thermal flying-height control sliders in hard disk drives

Abstract

Thermal flying-height control (TFC) sliders have been recently used in commercial hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase the HDDs’ capacity. The design of this new class of sliders depends on the numerical prediction of their flying performance, which requires a model for heat flux on the surface of the slider facing the disk. The currently widely used heat flux model is based on a first order slip theory and is believed to lack sufficient accuracy due to its limitation of applicability. This paper implements an improved heat flux model and compares numerical predictions of a TFC slider’s flying performance based on these two models with experiments. It is found that the numerical prediction based on the currently used model has a relative error less than 10% for a state-of-the-art TFC slider. It is suggested that the currently used model might cause large errors for the sliders which do not have a pressure peak near the transducer.