Today storage densities of nearly 100 Gbit/Inch2 are being shipped in commercially available magnetic recording hard disk drives and still increasing rapidly every year. Reading and writing such small bits of information requires the read and write heads to be flown at around 10 nm away from a fast moving disk surface. This is made possible by designing an airbearing on a slider that carries these heads. To enable the slider to orient itself precisely with respect to the disk, it is mounted on a stainless steel gimbal spring. Any deviation of angle of this gimbal spring from its design value leads to an extra torque on the slider that has to be balanced by the air bearing. To control the head disk spacing, it is therefore important to precisely set the static attitude (angle) of the gimbal spring. The static attitude has two component angles, the pitch static attitude (PSA) and the roll static attitude (RSA).
We shall present here a technique that uses short laser pulses to produce bending of the gimbal spring arms to adjust its static attitude. Bending is result of stress generated by surface melting of the stainless steel and the rapid quenching that follows. This allows us to change both pitch and roll static attitude. Structure of the gimbal spring has important bearing on the changes in the static attitude that can be produced. The challenges of precise light delivery, insitu measurement of angle and the laser adjust process will be discussed.
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