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.