Load/unload technology was discovered in the mid-1990s as a viable alternative to Contact Start-Stop (CSS), a method where the sliders which carry the Read/Write heads in hard disk drives land on the disk media
at power down, and remain stationed on the disk until the power up cycle. Although still used by some
vendors in non-mobile platform drives, CSS has inherent limitations which are ad- dressed by load/unload technology. HGST was the first hard disk drive manufacturer to implement load/unload technology, and found the wear durability benefits proven in early large hard drives incorporating the technology worthy of further research and development efforts. These activities gave rise to enhancements in the mechanics of load/unload, as well as lead to innovations in other areas of hard drive design. Today’s load/unload implementation relies on a ramp mechanism which provides numerous
benefits including greater durability, more efficient power utilization and superior shock resistance.
Stiction