Study Swaging Process for Reduction Swage Effect in Hard Disk Drive

Abstract

In hard disk drive manufacturing common uses ball swaging. It is a process that used to assemble a boss tower and an arm aperture. The swage ball has a larger diameter than an inner diameter of the boss tower. Application a compression force to the inner surface of the boss tower to hold both components together with adequate holding force and without damaging the boss tower components result in HGA torque retention. Measurements of HSA KPIV after swaging obtained from deformation of base plate and arm pad together. Due to hard disk drive is dynamically developed by increasing in the areal density and reducing in size, thus the arm pad is thinned. This study focuses on reducing of the swage effect by control outer arm pad deformation to maintain HSA performance. HGA torque retention was considered to reduce gap to arm and to avoid HSA resonance while swaging quality was similar. The 3-D FE method was used for analysis. The analysis and experiment show that HGA torque retention and the arm aperture modified was almost linear. Furthermore, the reduction of arm deformation and gap to arm cause increasing in HSA performance. The arm aperture can be modified for manufacturability.