UC San Diego

A control design methodology is proposed to control 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 behavior of the windage to design a low third-order discrete-time feedback controller to reduce windage-induced track misregistration. Experimental results show that nonrepeatable runout errors due to windage are reduced by an order of a magnitude.