Thin film head for quasi-contact head/disk interface

A thin film head with a single, nearly square, flat ABS with adequate edge blend instead of a conventional two-rail taper-flat slider has been developed. The flying height of the head was adjusted to a value of between 0.03 μm and 0.07 μm at 11.3 m/sec of head/disk relative velocity by modifying the gross ABS area and a gram load to be applied. Read/write performance of the head was measured reliably on sputtered γ-Fe₂O₃ disk with glass substrate. Significant improvement of electrical performance was attained primarily due to the extremely low flying height of the head. The head and the disk combination showed sufficient durability against 50000 cycles of in-contact start/stop operations