Method of making magnetic recording head slider and the resulting slider.

摘要

This patent discloses a method of making a magnetic recording head slider having reduced friction and stiction and greatly improved contact start stop performance in a hard disk drive. It is found that conventional diamond particle abrasives used for machining, lapping and polishing for fabrication of sliders leave considerable surface and subsurface damage on the air bearing surface. The damage is microscopic and consists of mechanically weakened areas which can become dislodged and entrapped between the slider and the disk surface. The dislodged particles act as an abrasive and increase the friction between the slider and the disk, and lead to accelerated wear of the disk surface. In this invention, the mechanically weakened areas on the air bearing surface are selectively removed by a mechanical surface treatment process using particle abrasives other than diamond. The resulting slider surface has a high degree of mechanical integrity even when subjected to prolonged repeat impact motion against the disk surface in contact start stop operation. Consequently, the interface between the air bearing and disk surfaces is free of hard debris and therefore the friction at the interface can be drastically reduced from that of the untreated slider surface. The proposed surface treatment method also provides an additional advantage of further reducing head/media stiction through creation of micro-texture on the slider surface which results from mechanical treatment of the slider surface. <IMAGE>