Optimized design of heaters for flying height adjustment to preserve performance and reliability

We developed a thermal flying-height control (TFC) slider to control the flying height of magnetic recording heads. The slider basically consists of a small heater fabricated near the read/write element. This study discusses the effect of heater size and heater location on the change in the flying height at the read/write element. We also discuss the resulting temperature rise due to the additional heat applied by the heater. Specifically, we have found that small heaters generally resulted in lower heater power per unit change in the flying height and lower head temperature rise per unit change in the flying height. In terms of heater location, we have found that a heater closer to the air-bearing surface (ABS) also tends to result in a larger change in the flying height because of the larger protrusion shape. However, the head temperature rose significantly. Therefore, shorter ABS/heater distance was a trade off lower power against higher rise in head temperature. We concluded that smaller heaters and the shorter ABS/heater distance are better as long as head reliability is ensured