Air bearing design, optimization, stability analysis andverification for sub-25 nm flying

Three sub-25 nm fly height sliders are presented for near contact recording. The designs are geared towards the goal of achieving 10 Gb/in ² areal density. The optimization procedure presented shows promise for facilitating achievement of this goal. The dynamic simulations show the stability of these designs when disturbed from their steady state conditions     

Hard disc drive air bearing design: modified DIRECT algorithm and its application to slider air bearing surface optimization

Hard disk drives continue to increase in areal data density. This requires air bearing sliders with lower and lower flying heights (FH). Also the uniformity of the FH and the flatness of the roll profile with radius become more critical as the FH gets lower. By using modern optimization techniques, it is possible to optimize slider air bearing surface (ABS) designs according to multiple design goals. In this paper, we discuss two modifications to the DIRECT algorithm: one to handle tolerance and one to deal with hidden constraints. Some numerical experiments were carried out using these modifications and the modified DIRECT algorithm was applied to slider ABS optimization. The results show that these two modifications can improve the efficiency of the DIRECT algorithm and they also provide more flexibility in slider ABS optimization.     

Multi-body structural effects on the head-disk interface during operational shocks in hard disk drives

Over the past decades, there has been an increase in the demand for hard disk drives (HDDs) used in mobile computing devices. The work performance of a HDD mainly depends on its ability to withstand external disturbances in such applications. Studies of the HDD’s responses and failures during external shocks can be very beneficial for improving the HDD’s designs. Multi-body operational shock (op-shock) models are developed to study the HDDs’ responses during external shocks. Four models which include different components (a disk, a spindle motor, a base plate, a pivot and a head actuator assembly) are introduced in this study to investigate the effects of various components on the drives’ operating performance. It is found that the models must include certain critical components in order to give results for performance reliability when subjected to operational shocks.     

Six-DOF vibrations of partial contact sliders in hard disk drives

A six-degree-of-freedom slider dynamic simulator is developed to analyze the slider’s motion in the vertical, pitch, roll, yaw, length and width directions. The modified time-dependent Reynolds equation is used to model the air bearing and a new second order slip model is used for a bounded contact air bearing pressure. The simulator considers the air bearing shear acting on the air bearing surface and the slider–disk contact and adhesion. Simulation results are analyzed for the effects of the disk surface micro-waviness and roughness, skew angle, slider–disk friction and micro-trailing pad width on the vertical bouncing, down-track and off-track vibrations of a micro-trailing pad partial contact slider.     

Experiments on slider lubricant interactions and lubricant transfer using TFC sliders

Future magnetic storage density targets (>4 Tb/in. ²) require subnanometer physical clearances that pose a tremendous challenge to the head disk interface (HDI) design. A detailed understanding of slider-lubricant interactions at small clearances and contact is important to not only address magnetic spacing calibration and long term HDI reliability but also to meet additional challenges imposed by future recording architectures such as heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). In this work, the behavior of the disk lubricant is investigated through controlled tests using TFC sliders which are actuated to proximity (i.e. backoff) and into contact (i.e. overpush) on one specific half of the disk per rotation by synchronization with the spindle index. Observations for lubricant distribution in contact tests (i.e. overpush) reveal an accumulation of lubricant on the disk near the onset of contact suggesting a migration of lubricant from the slider to the disk as the slider approaches the disk. Experiments also reveal that there is a similar deposition of lubricant even in the absence of contact for backoff tests. Furthermore, light contact tests result in significant lubricant rippling and depletion with associated slider dynamics. The lubricant rippling frequencies correlate well with the slider’s vibration frequencies. Interestingly, strong overpush may lead to stable slider dynamics (for certain air bearing designs) that is also associated with noticeably lower lubricant distribution (compared to the light contact case), and the greatest lubricant changes are observed only at the onset and the end of contact. This paper reveals the complex nature of slider-lubricant interactions under near-contact and contact conditions, and it highlights the need for further studies on the topic to help design a HDI for recording architectures of the future.     

Static and Dynamic Slider Air-Bearing Behavior in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording Under Thermal Flying Height Control and Laser System-Induced Protrusion

The air bearing’s response to regions of elevated temperature on its bounding surfaces (the slider and disk) may be an important consideration in the head–disk interface design of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) systems. We implement the general non-isothermal molecular gas lubrication equation into an iterative static solver and dynamic air-bearing solver to evaluate the effect of localized heating of the air-bearing surface (ABS) due to the near-field transducer (NFT). The heat-dissipating components in our simplified HAMR design are the NFT, laser diode, and thermal flying height control (TFC) heater. We investigate the effect of each HAMR slider component on ABS temperature and thermal deformation and the slider’s flying height. The NFT induces a localized thermal spot and protrusion on the larger TFC bulge, and it is the location of maximum temperature. This ABS temperature profile alters the air-bearing pressure distribution, increasing the pressure at the hot NFT location compared with predictions of an isothermal air-bearing solver, so that the center of the pressure acting on the ABS is slightly closer to the trailing edge, thereby decreasing the pitch angle and increasing the minimum flying height. Other researchers have shown that the NFT’s thermal response time may be much faster than its protrusion response time (Xu et al. in IEEE Trans Magn 48:3280–3283, 2012). The slider’s dynamic response to a time-varying NFT thermal spot on the ABS while the combined TFC and NFT induced thermal protrusion remains constant is investigated with our dynamic air-bearing solver. We simulate the slider’s step response to a suddenly applied ABS temperature profile and a pulsed temperature profile that represents laser-on over data zones and laser-off over servo zones. The sudden (step) or rapid (pulse) increase in ABS temperature induces a sudden or rapid increase in pressure at the NFT location, thereby exciting the air bearing’s first pitch mode. For the slider design and simulation conditions used here, the result of the pitch mode excitation is to alter the position of the center of pressure in the slider’s length direction, thereby changing the pitch moment. In response, the pitch angle and minimum flying height change. The step response decays after approximately 0.15 ms. Because the laser duty cycle is much shorter than this response time, a periodic disturbance is predicted for the center of pressure coordinate, pitch angle, and minimum flying height. The peak-to-peak minimum flying height modulations are relatively small (only up to 0.126 nm); more significantly, the time-averaged minimum flying height increases 0.5 nm for the NFT that reached 208 °C compared to simulations of the isothermal ABS at ambient temperature.     

Effect of shock pulse width on the shock response of small form factor disk drives

This paper discusses the effect of varying the shock pulse width on the shock response of small form factor hard disk drives. We develop a new shock simulator for hard disk drives which simulates the structural as well as the air bearing dynamics of the disk drive simultaneously. We observe that the response of the disk to the shock pulse is of critical importance and depends strongly on the pulse width of the shock pulse. We also find that if a suspension bending frequency is close to the first umbrella frequency of the disk, there can be failure of the head–disk interface due to resonance.     

An alternative to CFD: piecewise linear models for frequency spectra of flow induced drag in hard disk drives

A method is proposed to estimate the flow-induced drag on the actuator arm inside a hard disk drive. Typically, drag forces and moments on the actuator are computed as part of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution of the flow field in the entire drive. Unidirectional coupling from the flow to the structure is then imposed to determine the structural response of the arm to the flow induced forcing. The methodology proposed here aims to reduce the simulation time associated with the flow calculations by directly estimating the forcing functions. The approach involves fitting a piecewise linear model (PLM) to the forcing frequency spectrum and interpolating or extrapolating the model to provide estimates of the spectrum at different points in the parameter space. A simple guideline for the formulation of such models is the conservation of energy between the CFD and PLM spectrum. Numerical experiments show that the linear models predict the behavior of arm to within 3% accuracy of the full CFD solution. The proposed technique is applied to two parameters: the disk RPM and the radial position of the arm. Clear trends are manifested for both parameters, making it possible to use this method to estimate forcing functions for a range of disk speeds and radial positions of the arm. This technique opens up the possibility of flow related design or optimization, which was previously thought to be prohibitively expensive.     

Position error signal generation in hard disk drives based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA)

The position error signal (PES) in current hard disk drives is generated from the embedded servo data and used as the input for the track following controller. The servo pattern design and the decoding are both quite complicated in terms of the servo writing and servo detection, but they are important for the system dynamics study and track following controller design. In this paper, a novel scheme based on discrete fourier transformation (DFT) to decode the servo signal from a special magnetic servo pattern and generate the PES is proposed. In the scheme adjacent magnetic tracks with different frequencies are recorded to the disk and used as servo tracks to encode the position information. Simulation results show that the amplitudes at the two writing frequencies in the readback spectrum depend on the magnetic head position. The quadrature PES defined by the difference of the amplitudes is almost linear between the two adjacent tracks The simulation and off-line experimental results analysis agree with each other and prove the feasibility of this scheme. A real-time signal acquiring and processing system with a commercial field programmable gate array (FPGA) and ADC/DAC chips was built, and the proposed scheme was implemented in the FPGA to do the high-speed signal analysis. The magnetic head position information is extracted from the readback spectrum in the FPGA and transferred to a PC host for real-time graphic display using a labview interface. The system demonstrates an ability to generate the PES at 25 K samples per second with a resolution around 3 nm. The sampling rate can be enhanced further to 125 kHz if more servo sectors are written to the disk. This system provides a re-configurable research stage for studying the dynamic behavior of hard disk drives and for developing the control algorithm for track following.     

Demagnetization due to inverse magnetostriction effects inlongitudinal thin film media

Unpredictable mechanical stresses that occur during the operation of hard disk drives can degrade the recorded signal. On the basis of a micromagnetic analysis and the calculated stress field during head-disk impact, inverse magnetostriction effects in longitudinal recording thin film media are considered and demagnetization due to head-disk impact is simulated numerically. Thin film media are modeled as planar hexagonal arrays of hexagonally shaped grains. The computation uses the conjugate gradient algorithm to minimize the variation of the total energy. In particular, the effect of the stress on the relaxation process is investigated. Also the change in the remanent magnetization due to repetitive head-disk impacts is calculated. We obtained results indicating that the effect of the impact stress during dynamic loading is not so significant as to cause data loss during operation for the longitudinal thin film media