UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates the effects of shock and the disk surface pattern on the head disk interface (HDI) response in hard disk drives (HDDs). A new local adaptive mesh method is proposed at the end to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm to simulate the sliders' steady flying attitudes.

Over the past decades, there has been an increase in the demand of HDDs used in portable devices. In such applications, the work performance of a HDD mainly depends on its ability to withstand external disturbances. Studies of the HDD's responses and failures during external shocks can be very beneficial for improving the HDD's design.

A multi-body operational shock (op-shock) model is developed for this purpose in this thesis. The Guyan reduction method is used to model all the components considered in the op-shock model (a disk, a spindle motor, a base plate, a pivot and a head actuator assembly (HAA)). A fluid dynamic bearing (FDB), between the rotating and stationary units in the spindle motor, is simplified as a spring-dashpot system to save computation efforts. The same simplification is applied to a ball bearing (BB) system between the rotating and stationary units in the actuator pivot. Then the reduced models for all the components are assembled to obtain a complete multi-body op-shock model. Four models which include different components are introduced in this thesis to investigate various components' effects on the HDD's operating performance. The HDDs' failure mechanisms are also studied. It is found that different components influence the HDI responses in different ways.

The ramp load/unload (LUL) technology has been proved to be a better alternative to the contact start-stop (CSS) approach due to the advantages of increasing areal density and greater durability. However, the application of the LUL ramps in the HDDs increases the possibility of collisions between the disk and the ramps since the ramps sit closely to the disk's outer radius. Therefore, it is important to study the ramp effects on the HDD's response during a shock. A reduced model of a deformable ramp is developed and implemented to the multi-body op-shock model. Numerical analyses using three ramp models (no-ramp model, rigid ramp model and deformable ramp model) are carried out to study the HDD's failure dependence on different ramp models.

Bit patterned media (BPM) recording is one of the promising techniques for future disk drives in order to increase the areal density above 4 Tbit/in2. In patterned media, an individual recorded bit is stored in a distinct magnetic island. Thus, the BPM can change the topography of the disk surface and has an effect on the flying characteristics of the air bearing sliders. Proper designs of sliders and disks in the HDDs are required in order to achieve a stable work performance. So a simulator to model a slider's flying condition over a BPM disk is particularly important. Three methods (the averaging method, the Homogenization method and the Taylor expansion Homogenization methods) are implemented to simulate a slider's flying attitude, and finally an economical accurate method is chosen (the Taylor expansion Homogenization method) to investigate the slider's dynamics on partially planarized patterned media.

In modern HDDs, the requirement of small and steady head disk spacing leads to more complicated air bearing surface designs. Thus it is challenging for an air bearing simulator to accurately capture the pressure under a slider's surface. A new local adaptive grid-generating algorithm is developed and is used to simulate the sliders' steady flying attitude. Local finer meshes (mesh's dimension decreases to half) are created on the nodes of the current grids, which have pressure gradients or geometry gradients larger than a pre-defined tolerance. Two sliders are used to demonstrate the applicability of this method. It is found that this new local adaptive grid-generating method improves the stability and efficiency of the simulation scheme.