Abstract
An embedded contact sensor (ECS), which is a thermal sensor built into a head slider, has been used for contact detection between the head slider and the disk in hard disk drives. Our previous research showed that the ECS temperature effect caused by self-heating is smaller than by the thermal fly height control (TFC) heater. In this work, ECS sensitivity for head / disk contact detection was studied in the point of the distance between TFC and ECS. The results showed that the temperature caused by the TFC heater is a key factor for the contact detection.
