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Concept
Disk read-and-write head
Summary
A disk read-and-write head is the small part of a disk drive which moves above the disk platter and transforms the platter's magnetic field into electric current (reads the disk) or, vice versa, transforms electric current into magnetic field (writes the disk). The heads have gone through a number of changes over the years.
In a hard drive, the heads fly above the disk surface with clearance of as little as 3 nanometres. The flying height has been decreasing with each new generation of technology to enable higher areal density. The flying height of the head is controlled by the design of an air bearing etched onto the disk-facing surface of the slider. The role of the air bearing is to maintain the flying height constant as the head moves over the surface of the disk. The air bearings are carefully designed to maintain the same height across the entire platter, despite differing speeds depending on the head distance from the center of the platter. If the head hits the disk's surface, a catastrophic head crash can result.
Inductive heads use the same element for both reading and writing.
The heads themselves started out similar to the heads in tape recorders—simple devices made out of a tiny C-shaped piece of highly magnetizable material such as permalloy or ferrite wrapped in a fine wire coil. When writing, the coil is energized, a strong magnetic field forms in the gap of the C, and the recording surface adjacent to the gap is magnetized. When reading, the magnetized material rotates past the heads, the ferrite core concentrates the field, and a current is generated in the coil. In the gap the field is very strong and quite narrow. That gap is roughly equal to the thickness of the magnetic media on the recording surface. The gap determines the minimum size of a recorded area on the disk. Ferrite heads are large, and write fairly large features. They must also be flown fairly far from the surface thus requiring stronger fields and larger heads.
Metal-in-gap (MIG) heads are ferrite heads with a small piece of metal in the head gap that concentrates the field.
Official source
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