Tribology and Nano-Tribology Problems in Data Storage on Hard Disks

In current "State of the art" disk drives, the flying height between slider and disk is on the order of 10 nm. The flying height will need to be reduced to approximately 3 nm to meet future storage density goals. At a spacing of 3 nm, severe tribological problems will occur with respect to friction, wear and lubrication of the head/disk interface. In this paper, tribology and nano-tribology problems of the head/disk interface are examined as the recording density is increased towards 1Tbit/inch2.