Hard Drive R/W head

[siliconGary]

I saw there have been quite a few excellent macro shots of hard drive heads posted in the macro forum, but did not see any microscopy images of the heads. This is from a teardown of a 2004 hard drive

It is a stitched set of stacked images (Stack 'n' Stitch ;-) (Hugin stitch, Zerene Pmax stack), Olympus BH2 5x objective, DF (epitaxial) illumination, EOS1300D



Virtually all the pictures I could find on the web do not show the actual read/write head which is on the tip of the slider structure. This is the head shot 'end on' with same 5x DF set-up (~60 image stack)



And this is with a 10x objective:



I was playing with the angle to try and show the fact that the actual read write coil straddles a bevel along the top edge. The reflection in the foreground was a bonus!
That coil is a 1.5um wide (1.5um space) with 4 turns around what I presume is a very small piece of ferrite. There are more images and discussion on my blog

[Jacek]

Nice

[rjlittlefield]

Excellent!

I do not recall seeing the actual read/write coil imaged before.

Nice job on this. For that matter, nice job on the whole teardown report -- very interesting!

--Rik