Carbon Overcoat Oxidation in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

Due to the ever increasing demand for higher storage capacity in disk drives, novel techniques to read and write information, such as heat-assisted magnetic recording are being developed. However, the recording temperatures impact not only the media but also the carbon overcoat that is used to protect both the media and writing head. In this paper, we discuss the effect of thermal annealing on the rate of carbon erosion on overcoats deposited using two different techniques, viz. filtered-cathodic arc and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition.