Lube-Surfing Recording and Its Feasibility Exploration

Reducing the spacing between the magnetic head and the magnetic disk media is of crucial importance in enabling further increased recording density of the magnetic disk drives. The head-disk interface technology explored up to now can be classified into the following two categories: in-fly recording and in-contact recording. Pushing the areal density towards 10 Tb/in² requires the magnetic spacing down to 3 nm level, which it is difficult for the conventional in-fly or in-contact schemes to achieve so small a magnetic spacing. This paper reports the authors´ exploration of lube-surfing recording mechanism-majority of slider surface flying over the disk surface and only the tiny protruded read/write head area surfing on the lubricant surface of the disk. The key factors for achieving such a mechanism include technology to sense slider-lubricant contact, nano-actuator and active contact depth control, advanced slider air-bearing design to make the slider well follow up the disk surface waviness and secure the contact depth, super-smooth slider and disk surfaces, and so on. Results presented in this work suggest that the read head can be a promising transducer for slider-lubricant contact detection. Results also suggest that contact depth control is important for this scheme and it is possible to have stable slider surfing on the lubricant, if the contact depth is within a certain range.