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Application Notes
In hard disk drives, digital information is stored and retrieved magnetically by a “read head” which lies over the disk within tens of nanometers of its surface. Figure 1 is a photograph of a read head and hard disk together. To protect the magnetic material in which information is stored, a hard overcoat is applied to the surface which may be as thin as just a few nanometers. The hard overcoat protects the underlying material by acting both as a lubricant and a mechanical barrier. Hard-disk manufacturers are keenly interested in measuring the mechanical properties of such overcoats in order to gain knowledge for product improvement, and instrumented indentation has emerged as the technique of choice for making these measurements. However, indentation results for the overcoat are inevitably lower than the true values, because the coating is so thin. That is, some of the deformation from the indentation test is accommodated by the material under the coating of interest, which makes the coating appear more compliant than it actually is.
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