Abstract
To increase the areal recording density of hard disk drives, the magnetic spacing between the head and magnetic disk must be reduced. Therefore, the head-disk clearance also has to be reduced. Thermal flying height control technology has been applied to move the head element close to the disk in recent hard disk drives. However, it is necessary to control flying height properly to keep the same clearance because it changes in various environmental conditions. We have focused on studying the effect of environmental conditions on the clearance. In a humid environment, it is generally observed that a slider loses its flying height possibly due to the pressure drops caused by water vapor condensation in the air bearing. In our experiment, the effect of humidity on clearance was investigated quantitatively with an environmentally controlled component tester. Our finding was that the clearance variation due to humidity is because of not only flying height decrease but also disk touch-down height increase.
