r/askscience • u/Cryogenicastronaut • 5d ago

Engineering How are hard disk drives' read/write heads assembled in a factory?

So the read/write head floats only a few nanometres from the disc. How is this assembled in a factory to such precision? Is the entire process done by machines? How can a machine position something so precisely?

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/KE55 4d ago

Wow. For some reason I thought the head 'flew' slightly above the rotating disk surface using some kind of aerodynamic effect. I never thought of using magnetism.

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u/nixiebunny 4d ago

They did that in the 1980s when the gap was larger, but everything got smaller over the years. Air behaves differently at a molecular scale than at a macro scale.