Effects of Slider-driven Piezo-microactuator Placements and Profiles on HGA Sway Mode

With areal recording density of hard disk drives (HDD) historically growing at an average of 60% per year, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain the precise positioning required of the eversmaller GMR heads to read and write data. It is predicted that 100 Gb/in HDD areal density would be probably delivered by 2003. To reach such high track densities, the lower mechanical disturbances and higher servo-control bandwidth is required. The dualstage servo system has been considered as the most promising solution. The motivation of this work is to analyze the effects of the slider-driven micro-actuator placements and profiles on head gimbal assembly (HGA) microactuator sway mode. Results showed that the sway mode frequency was obviously increased by selecting micro-actuator placements and its profiles, optimally.