High Temperature Mechanics, Friction, Wear and Adhesion of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

The majority of data generated today is stored in magnetic storage hard disk drives (HDD) of enterprise-level data centers. The HDD industry is striving for higher areal density capacity to meet increasing demand for data storage. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) has been proposed as the next-generation technology that will bring revolutionary areal density gains. However, the technology comes with elevated temperature conditions and inevitably brings corresponding challenges to the head–disk interface (HDI). HDI high temperature tribology is the primary failure mode of HDDs and is discussed in the present work. Temperature dependence of mechanical properties, friction, wear and adhesion are reported based on experimental results from nanoindentation, nanoscratch, nanowear and adhesion experiments. The data reveals quantitative variations of Young’s modulus, hardness, coefficient of friction, and surface energy with temperature. In addition, XPS analysis is performed to measure chemical surface changes, and correlated with the nanomechanical findings. Graphical Abstract