Design and Analysis of Disk Bump to Improve the Unloading Performance in HDD

In most hard disk drives that apply the ramp load/unload technology, the head is unloaded at the outer edge of the disk while the disk is rotating. During the unloading process, slider-disk contacts may occur by lift-off force and rebound of the slider. The main issue of this paper is to prevent the slider-disk contact by rebound, and we apply a disk bump to the unloading process. To do so, first, the ranges of bump dimension are determined. Second, the stability of each bump is checked by dynamic simulation. Finally, unload simulations are performed for stable bump designs. As a result of these steps, the effect of the bump design and the position for the unloading performance were investigated. As a consequence, we propose the optimal bump design to improve the unloading performance. Furthermore, we can identify to remove rebound contact by applying a bump on disk during the unloading process.