Positioning Control of Servo Track Writing Systems for Hard Disk Drives

Abstract

Self-servo track writing (SSTW) in hard disk drives (HDDs) is a process of writing a subsequent track from the previously written track. One of the issues with SSTW is how to minimize the propagation of writing errors from previous tracks. This paper presents a control method for reducing error propagation in the SSTW process. The proposed method determines the error compensation signal according to the repeatable run-out, which is calculated from the previous writing error. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by numerical simulations of the benchmark problem for HDDs.