Introduction A common failure of a hard drive occurs when a computer is moved or dropped and the read heads come into contact with the hard disk platters. If permanent deformation is caused from this contact you may get the infamous blue screen. To protect the disks and sliders, a diamond-like- carbon (DLC) coating is applied to each component. The coatings on the hard disks are usually 4nm to 30nm of thickness and the coatings on the sliders are typically 2nm to 4nm of thickness. Manufacturing conditions greatly affect the mechanical properties and the durability of the DLC coatings. Typically, instrumented indentation testing (nanoindentation) is used to determine the mechanical properties of thin fi lms; however, due to overwhelming substrate infl uence, nanoindentation will not provide substrate independent mechanical properties of the ultra-thin DLC fi lms.