Flying Instability due to Organic Compounds in Hard Disk Drive

Abstract EN

The influence of organic compounds (OCs) on the head-disk interface (HDI) was investigated in hard disk drives.

The drives were tested at high temperature to investigate the influence of gaseous OC and to confirm if the gaseous OC forms droplets on head or disk.

In the experiment, errors occurred by readback signal jump and we observed the droplets on the disk after full stroke seek operation of the drive.

Our results indicate that the gaseous OC condensed on the slider and caused flying instability resulting in drive failure due to slider contact with a droplet of liquid OC.

Furthermore, this study shows that kinetic viscosity of OC is an important factor to cause drive failure using alkane reagents.