Pin-on-disk study of head wear in contact recording systems

One of the main subjects to be solved for realizing contact recording systems (CRS) in future high density HDDs is reduction of head wear. However, there are few reports on the reduction of contact head wear. For this purpose, we started wear studies on thin-film magnetic disks by using transparent pin-on-disk wear tests and investigated pin wear on various thin-film disk surfaces for CRS. Though our transparent pin-on-disk wear test is very convenient in studying wear characteristics, the correlation between pin wear and head-pad wear has not been clear. In this paper, we first describe our study on the effects of several parameters of disk lubricants (difference in MW, molecular dispersion, and end groups). We then explain our study of pin and head wear on the same set of disk surfaces and compare the relation between them. The results showed that the pin-on-disk wear test could be used for contact head wear study.