Characterization of intermittent contact head disk interface

Lube-surfacing recording combined with thermal fly-height control (TFC) technology is considered as a promising head-disk interface (RDI) scheme for further increasing magnetic areal density to 5-10 Tbits/in². To realize this alternative technology, a lot of tricky issues are required to be solved. In this paper, the methodologies to detect the TFC slider-lube/disk contacts and corresponding approaches to explore the feasibility of lube-surfing recording are reported.