Wear life prediction of contact recording head

In designing contact recording hard disk drives (HDD), predicting the wear life of heads is very important. One needs to develop a method to estimate head wear. The authors first propose a head wear life prediction method that uses an extended wear equation that was previously developed by Kawakubo et al. (1997). In the equation, the wear volume was proportional to the contact load and to a fractional power of the sliding distance. The authors then verified the equation for carbon overcoated pins sliding on recent thin-film disks. Next, they predicted the wear life of a contact recording system. Finally, they designed a head wear life prediction chart based on the equation. Using the chart, the authors can easily compare the wear test results with a permissible wear volume and predict the head wear life of an HDD system.