Slider air bearing designs for load/unload applications

Author

Zeng, Qing-Hua ; Bogy, David B.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Mech. Eng., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA

Volume

35

Issue

2

fYear

1999

fDate

3/1/1999 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

746

Lastpage

751

Abstract

Dynamic load/unload (L/UL) has been widely used in portable drives, and it shows great potential in future high performance drives for avoiding slider-disk wear and stiction. Most current sliders are designed for contact-start-stop, and are not suitable for L/UL. In this paper, a previously introduced L/UL model for numerical simulation is improved. Four basic designs of air bearing surfaces with sub-ambient pressure cavities are presented, and their L/UL processes are simulated. We find that the ABS design significantly affects the L/UL performance. Two designs show very good unload performance, and the other two do not. We introduce a new slider, which meets all design and fabrication requirements, that has been designed specifically for L/UL. Further ways to improve its load performance are also discussed

Keywords

disc drives; hard discs; sliding friction; stiction; disk drives; disk wear; hard disks; load performance; load/unload applications; slider air bearing designs; stiction; sub-ambient pressure cavities; unload performance; Application software; Cascading style sheets; Computer aided manufacturing; Contamination; Disk drives; Laboratories; Numerical simulation; Optical recording; Portable computers; Rails;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9464

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/20.750639

Filename

750639