Stiction free slider for lightly textured disks

We developed a Stiction Free Slider that has pads on the air bearing surface to reduce the stiction between the head and disk. This paper presents our extended experimental data on the SFS for use on lightly textured disks. The SFS shows excellent CSS performances on disks having an average roughness of 0.8 nm with 1.5 -2.5 nm thick lubricant. The wear of pads is negligible after 100,000 Contact Start/Stop cycles. This novel technique has an excellent potential to overcome the tribology obstacle and thus enable ultra high density recordings.