HAMR HDD Shock Responses

Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and slim mobile hard disk drives (HDD) are being developed parallelly to maintain cost advantage over the solid state drive (SSD). Operational shock and non-operational shock capabilities are seriously challenged for the slim HDDs due to reduced stiffness (thickness). It is worse for slim HAMR drives due to additional laser diode (LD) and other necessities being added on slider. Shock tests are part of the key performance matrices that must be passed in HDD reliability tests, and the concerns for HAMR mobile drives are, 1) slider lift-off G-level degradation during op-shock, and 2) LD back-to-back hitting during non-operational shock. We studied a few potential HAMR HGA designs, also analyzed a design that improves drive op-shock performances.