Investigation of tribological and read-write performance of textured sliders

Slider surface texturing is a promising new way to improve the tribological performance of future hard disk drives with very low flying heights. In this study, proximity recording sliders with a design flying height of 6 nm at 20 m/s were textured using oxygenated plasma etching. In order to protect the read-write element, texturing of sliders was performed after positioning a mica mask over the read-write element. The tribological and read-write performance of the slider before texturing was compared with the tribological and magnetic performance of the same slider after texturing. It was found that no degradation of the read-write performance occurred and that the tribological performance of the slider was improved after texturing.