Numerical Hard Disk Drive Seek Acoustic Transfer Analysis and Experimental Validation

Seek acoustics in a hard disk drive (HDD) contributes significantly to overall HDD acoustic level. HDD seek acoustics is mainly caused by the seek current and the HDD mechanical structure when excited. Seek acoustic transfer function (ATF) approach has been successfully employed to give quick prediction of HDD seek acoustic noise with different mechanical structure designs and seek current profiles. In this paper, a numerical HDD seek ATF is developed based on finite element method (FEM) and boundary element method (BEM) to generate a model to predict the seek acoustics. The numerical results agree well with experimental results. The effects of HDD temperature and seek length on seek ATF also have been experimentally studied.