Quasi-contact testing of carbon nitride hard disk overcoats

An accelerated wear test procedure suitable for testing the durability of the hard disk overcoat in a quasi-contact head-disk interface operation mode has been investigated and applied to carbon overcoats with various amount of nitrogen incorporation. Strong correlations have been obtained among the wear test results, surface roughness and friction measurements. Carbon overcoats with a high level of nitrogen incorporation appear to be most wear resistive.