Head-Disk Dynamics in the Flying, Near Contact, and Contact Regimes

Abstract

To achieve an areal density approaching 50 Gb/in.2 for the magnetic storage of data in hard disk drives requires reduced mechanical and magnetic spacing. Off-track jitter caused by airflow or contact can cause track misregistration on the order of 20–70 nm which may be excessive for adequate servo performance. The magnetic signal can be used to identify both the vertical spacing modulation due to the air bearing modes and off-track jitter due to suspension modes with nanometer resolution. We find that the off-track jitter in the flying regime is driven by airflow and is a strong function of the disk velocity and the suspension type. In the contact regime, the vertical spacing modulation and off-track jitter increase due to contact. Using a laser Doppler vibrometer we identified the leading contribution to the off-track jitter to be primarily the first torsional mode (T1) and to a lesser extent the first bending mode (B1) of the suspension.