Temperature Induced Near-field Transducer (NFT) Failure in Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR)

We have studied the reliability of a near field transducer (NFT) embedded in a magnetic recording slider used for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) in hard disk drives with a linear velocity of 20 m/s. The NFT head structure and the disk are separated by an air film of 2 nm thickness. In this work, the magnetic write width and amplitude of the written magnetic signal on the disk are used as a “health-monitor” for the reliability of the NFT under long-term thermal exposure. The results show that the reliability of the NFT head structure decreases sharply with increasing temperature of the near field transducer but depends only slightly on the media temperature.