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To accommodate pseudo-contact and contact recording, new slider materials for high-performance heads must be developed. A new candidate for an advanced slider material is SiC. To compare the tribological properties of SiC with [Al.sub.2][O.sub.3]-TiC (AlTiC), today's standard thin film head slider/wafer material, heads with SiC dummy sliders have been manufactured and compared to an AlTiC slider. All test heads were subjected to both dynamic friction testing as well as an AFM mapping comparing surface topography and nano-friction. The friction for SiC heads was observed to be highly dependent on its surface roughness and may start out even higher than AlTiC. However, the increase in friction over contact time of SiC is much shallower than for AlTiC, therefore the long term friction and wear performance of SiC sliders are superior.

Future disk files will operate at lower flying height, thus increasing the possibility of asperity contacts. Conventional tests include sliding (Pin-On-Disk or Slider-On-disk), flying (flyability tests), or Contact Start/Stop modes of operation. A Novel Accelerated Wear Test (NAWT) was developed to produce intermittent asperity contacts. The NAWT operates in a mixed sliding and flying region, and is designed to operate in a zone of interaction where a significant number of asperity contacts occur. The NAWT uses an Acoustic Emission sensor to detect asperity contacts. The signal is processed by Fast Fourier Transform to detect significant increase in the frequency and severity of the contacts. The new apparatus and procedure are presented along with illustrative results.