Wear life prediction of contact recording head

In designing contact recording hard disk drives, it is very important to predict head wear life. For this purpose, one of the authors reported an extended wear equation, where wear volume was proportional to the contact force and a fractional power of sliding distance. In this paper, we propose a head wear life prediction chart using this equation. To represent system parameters and material parameters, head-disk contact force and specific wear amount of the head materials were selected. Using the two parameters, we could compare wear test results with the permissible wear amount and predict the head wear life in an HDD system. With recent results of a transparent pin wear test, we predicted an achievable wear life.