A novel wear-in-pad approach to minimizing spacing at the head/disk interface

Here we demonstrate a new approach to bring the disk drive recording head close to the disk media, while achieving tight control of the final head-media separation. The slider in this approach has a miniature Wear-In-Pad (WIP) at its trailing edge, encapsulating the read/write elements. As the slider flies over the disk, the slider overcoat and head recession are quickly worn off, resulting in the bottom of read and write elements clearing the disk roughness by only a few nanometers. We show that the Wear-In-Pad is a viable way to achieve the sub 7 nm head-media separations believed to be necessary for Tb/in² recording.