Drive Failure Rate Due to Encroachment during Seek: A Numerical Simulation

摘要

A quantitative estimate of the drive failure rate is helpful for budgeting head media as well as servo-mechanical performance margins. In this study, we developed a numerical model to calculate the probability of drive failure due to encroachments of the data track by adjacent tracks during seeks. The model combined the head media bit error rate (BER) and off-track capability (OTC) simulations and measured in-drive position error signal (PES) distributions during seeks. We applied this model to drive populations with two different nominal writer widths, compared the contributions from PES during seek and the steady state track mis-registration (TMR). We also evaluated the effects of write fault gate.