Talk:Flying height

Circular reference back to Wikipedia

Reference #2 (http://www.acsdata.com/how-a-hard-drive-works.htm) specifies Wikipedia as the data source on the second page. Analognipple (talk) 19:58, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

head contact

The article says : "The earliest hard disks had no flying height; their heads were in contact with the media.[citation needed]"

Citation needed indeed, this seems like a bad idea. And from the article on the history of HDDs, flying heads allowed the heads to be closer to the platters, so I'm guessing that before this improvement the heads were farther from the media, like a CD lens, not in contact. Aesma (talk) 06:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

The "no flying height" statement is wrong. The first commercial hard-disk drive (IBM's RAMAC) used forced air to maintain a 0.002-inch (51-micron) spacing between the head and disk. The 1301 (introduced in 1961) was the first to attach the head to a "Hydrodynamic Air-Bearing Slider," which generated its own cushion of pressurized air to allow the slider and head to "fly" much closer to (but still above) the disk surface (250 microinches = 6.35 microns). (Reference: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/timeline/Timeline_SJ_Research.pdf )

Current research is aimed at achieving sub-nanometer head-disk clearances! (1 nanometer = 0.001 micron) (Reference: “A multidentate lubricant for use in hard disk drives at sub-nanometer thickness,” X-C Guo et al, J. Appl. Phys. 111, 024503 (2012) http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/111/2/10.1063/1.3677984) Almadenmike (talk) 01:41, 26 February 2014 (UTC)