Scratch Testing of Hard Drive Components

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A common failure of a hard drive occurs when a computer is moved or dropped and the read heads come into contact with the hard disk platters. If permanent deformation is caused from this contact you may get the infamous blue screen. To protect the disks and sliders, a diamond-like-carbon (DLC) coating is applied to each component. The coatings on the hard disks are usually 4nm to 30nm of thickness and the coatings on the sliders are typically 2nm to 4nm of thickness. Manufacturing conditions greatly affect the mechanical properties and the durability of the DLC coatings. Typically, instrumented indentation testing (nanoindentation) is used to determine the mechanical properties of thin ilms; however, due to overwhelming substrate inluence, nanoindentation will not provide substrate independent mechanical properties of the ultra-thin DLC ilms.

In the situation where substrate inluences overwhelm quantitative results of indentation, a nanoindenter can be used to perform scratch testing to obtain qualitative results through mimicking product failure in a controlled test. For testing hard disk and sliders, a scratch test can be used to evaluate the DLC ilm failure. In this application note, the results from scratch testing—using the Keysight Technologies, Inc. G200 Nano Indenter and the stage of the Nano Vision option —four hard disk samples and a slider from a hard drive are compared showing clear and statistical differences in the response of the different coatings on the hard disks and positional variation of the coating on the slider.

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