Recently, the achievement of further high-efficiency and high-quality polishing of glass disks as substrates of hard disk drives has been strongly required for reducing the production cost, increasing the storage capacity and downsizing the drive. In order to meet the requirements, it is very important to clarify and improve the polishing properties of suede polishing pads widely used in polishing glass disks and however, a very few researches concerning the pads have been conducted. Thus to overcome the problem, we performed the polishing experiments for glass disks in actual and found that the surface structure of the suede pads is key factor for improving the polishing efficiency. Based on the findings, we proposed a new polishing method that the polishing pad / workpiece contact zone is made intermittent and abrasives are uniformly supplied on the contact zone. As a result, it was found that high-efficiency and high-quality finishing were achieved by the method, as compared with the conventional polishing method.
