The recent rapid growth of the information industry has strongly increased the demand for large-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs). This means that increasing the areal recording density has become an important technical challenge in HDD development. To increase the HDD areal recording density, we have developed emerging technologies for high-accuracy positioning control of magnetic heads in the head-positioning system of HDDs. This paper introduces two examples of emerging technologies for future HDDs: “Vibration Control with Thin-Film-Coil Actuator” and “High-Bandwidth Control with Thermal Actuator”. The former utilizes a film-coil actuator attached to a coil of a voice-coil motor. The latter utilizes a thermal actuator in the magnetic head. These control systems employ triple-stage-actuator systems to improve the control performance of the head-positioning system. The validation results showed that these control systems enable us to achieve high-accuracy positioning control of magnetic heads for future HDDs.
