Alternate air bearing slider designs for areal density of 1 Tb/in2

To achieve the areal density goal in hard disk drives of 1 Tb/in² the minimum physical spacing or flying height (FH) between the read/write transducer and disk must be reduced to about 2 nm. At such low spacing new nanoscale forces act between the slider and disk, such as intermolecular and electrostatic forces, which must be taken into consideration in the air bearing design. These forces increase the level of flying height modulations (FHMs), which in turn creates dynamic instability and intermittent contact in the flying head slider similar to what has been observed in experiments. Here, we present three possible approaches to minimize such forces and/or reduce FHM by FH control, including a micro-trailing pad slider, a thermal flying height control slider, and a piezoelectric flying height control slider for hard disk drives.