Friction and wear properties of hard coating materials on textured hard disk sliders

It has been a common practice to apply a surface texture to disk surface in hard disk drive in order to minimize the stiction force caused by the contact of extremely smooth surfaces of head sliders and disks. The slider surface texture was also suggested recently with the advantage of using smoother disks. The slider surface texture reduced the stiction effect, meanwhile it increased the contact pressure between sliders and disks. The protective coating is required on the textured slider surface to reduce the wear of the texture. In the present research, four kinds of hard coating materials were synthesized by IBAD and evaluated on textured slider surfaces by drag test. The results showed that the a-CNx coating had higher wear resistance than sputtered carbon, TiNx and BNx coatings on textured slider surfaces.