A more efficient approach for investigation of effect of various HDD components on the shock tolerance

This paper emphasizes the importance of a fast and reliable tool for design parametric studies. Three methods that have been used in studying the shock phenomena in hard disk drives (HDD) are discussed briefly. A more efficient (i.e. faster and reasonably accurate) method is proposed. This new method uses state-space formulation to model the structural components of the HDD and quasi-static concept to model the non-linearity of the air bearing. The structural and the air bearing response, and their coupled interaction are evaluated simultaneously. The computation time and the accuracy of the proposed method are compared against two existing methods: the full finite element model and CML’s HDD dynamics event simulator. The proposed method is found to be much faster with reasonably good accuracy. Experimental shock tests also show that the method is reliable in predicting the shock tolerance of the HDD. A procedure on how to do parametric study with this method is proposed and the effect of overmold and voice coil stiffness on the shock tolerance is studied.