Design and Dynamics of Flying Height Control Slider With Piezoelectric Nanoactuator in Hard Disk Drives

To achieve the areal density goal in hard disk drives of 1 Tbit/ in.2 the minimum physical spacing or flying height (FH) between the read/write element and disk must be reduced to 2 nm. A brief review of several FH adjustment schemes is first presented and discussed. Previous research showed that the actuation efficiency (defined as the ratio of the FH reduction to the stroke) was low due to the significant air bearing coupling. In this paper, an air bearing surface design, Slider B, for a FH control slider with a piezoelectric nanoactuator is proposed to achieve virtually 100% efficiency and to increase dynamics stability by minimizing the nanoscale adhesion forces. A numerical study was conducted to investigate both the static and dynamic performances of the Slider B, such as uniformity of gap FH with near-zero roll over the entire disk, ultrahigh roll stiffness and damping, low nanoscale adhesion forces, uniform FH track-seeking motion, dynamic load/unload, and FH modulation. Slider B was found to exhibit an overall enhancement in performance, stability, and reliability in ultrahigh density magnetic recording. DOI: 10.1115/1.2401208