Reduction of Flow Induced Suspension Vibrations in a Hard Disk Drive by Dual-Stage Suspension Control

Abstract — A control design methodology is proposed to con-trol an active dual-stage suspension for the reduction of flow induced vibrations (windage) in a hard disk drive. The design of the controller uses dynamical models of both the suspension and the stochastic behaviour of the windage to design a low 3rd order discrete time feedback controller to reduce windage induced track misregistration. Experimental results show that non-repeatable runout errors due to windage are reduced by an order of a magnitude