Flying Instability due to Organic Compounds in Hard Disk Drive

Abstract

The influence of organic compounds (OCs) on the head-disk interface (HDI) was investigated in hard disk drives. The drives were tested at high temperature to investigate the influence of gaseous OC and to confirm if the gaseous OC forms droplets on head or disk. In the experiment, errors occurred by readback signal jump and we observed the droplets on the disk after full stroke seek operation of the drive. Our results indicate that the gaseous OC condensed on the slider and caused flying instability resulting in drive failure due to slider contact with a droplet of liquid OC. Furthermore, this study shows that kinetic viscosity of OC is an important factor to cause drive failure using alkane reagents.

Effects of SiO2 Contaminant on Thermo-Mechanical/Chemical Properties and Lubricity of PFPE Lubricants

“…They claimed that the presence of these contaminants and foreign particles inside HDDs can accelerate the lubricant transfer process. For these reasons, researchers have investigated the contamination of the air-bearing-surface (ABS) of a head slider through experiments and numerical simulations [8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Various approaches were proposed to describe the mechanisms on how lubricants are transferred and picked up to a head surface, which includes the process of material evaporation, desorption, condensation, and molecular interaction in the HDI.…”