Nanometre scale island-type texture with controllable height and area ratio formed by ion-beam etching on hard-disk head sliders

Abstract

It has been common practice to apply a surface texture to the disk surface in a hard disk drive in order to minimize the stiction force caused by the contact of the extremely smooth surfaces of the head slider and disk. The surface of head sliders is usually made as smooth as possible without any purposely formed texture. In this work, a texture on the hard-disk slider surface was formed by ion-beam etching as a result of the different etching rates among the different phases composing the material of the hard-disk slider. By this method, an island-type texture can be formed on the air-bearing surface of the hard-disk slider. The relation between the texturing condition, the slider material and the shape of the obtained texture is discussed. The texture area ratio was 6-36%, and the diameter of the island was in the range of 0.3-4 µm. The texture area ratio and island diameter could be changed by changing the composition of head slider material. The height of island could be linearly controlled from 3-20 nm with an accuracy of ±1 nm by changing the dose of the ion beam. It is concluded that ion-beam texturing is a promising method for producing texture on the slider surface, with the advantage of simple processing.

Use of Textured Surfaces to Mitigate Sliding Friction and Wear of Lubricated and Non-Lubricated Contacts

“…Fine-scale textures, achieved by ion-etching that raised small islands from 3 to 30 nm high and from 0.3 to 4 m in length, were placed on the 'sliders' of disk drives in an attempt to reduce stiction [28]. Arrays of 229-548 nm-sized ellipsoidal dimple arrays were produced using a femptosecond laser on silicon surfaces [29].…”

Experimental study on the wettability of microtextured surfaces generated by the ultrasonic-assisted face turning

“…Nowadays, there are various methods to fabricate surface textures for controlling the surface wettability, which are generally classified into the mechanical, [10][11][12] ion beam texturing, 13,14 etching, 15,16 and energy beam techniques. [17][18][19] Numerous manufacturing processes have been suggested and applied for the microstructure generation, but this challenge remains to generate microstructures on the surfaces, efficiently and accurately.…”

Slider vibration reduction using slider surface texture

“…The first to propose the use of textured sliders was Chen (1997, personal communication), who used mechanical methods to roughen the slider surface. Zhou et al (1998Zhou et al ( , 1999Zhou et al ( , 2000aZhou et al ( , 2000bZhou et al ( , c, 2002a proposed a slider surface texturing method using ion beam etching. In their studies, the friction between slider and disk was measured as a function of surface roughness in a constant speed drag test.…”