Estimation method for unobservable settling vibration of head-positioning control in hard disk drives

To improve reliability in hard disk drives, we proposed an estimation method for unobservable settling vibration in head-positioning control systems. Our proposed method uses both observability and excitability of mechanical vibrations in settling time of a track-seeking control. To see the observability, we employed the estimation method of unobservable amplitude of oscillations caused by mechanical resonances. To see the excitability, we also employed the Shock Response Spectrum (SRS) analysis that can handle the transient characteristics of mechanical vibrations. Simulations and experiments results on the track-seeking control showed that the results of our proposed method were good approximate solutions of the unobservable settling vibrations. This means that we can estimate the risk of the unobservable settling vibrations which may lead to destruction of user data in hard disk drives by using the proposed method. As a result, we can chose the best suited solution to avoid unobservable vibrations in the head-positioning control systems.