George M. Clifford

An air bearing minimizing the effects of slider skew angle

A minislider incorporating a single transverse slot across both rails is presented which greatly reduces the effect of slider skew. The slots, in conjunction with wide rails, allow a slider mounted on a rotary actuator to access the entire disk at a spacing of 100 to 120 nm. Skew decreases the head-to-disk spacing of conventional minisliders and is a particular problem in disk drives equipped with rotary actuators as slider rail width is decreased. The flying characteristics of this slider are investigated by a computer simulation program and by measurements on actual sliders with a multichannel laser interferometer. >