Slider air bearing designs for load/unload applications

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