Effect of shock pulse width on the shock response of small form factor disk drives

This paper discusses the effect of varying the shock pulse width on the shock response of small form factor hard disk drives. We develop a new shock simulator for hard disk drives which simulates the structural as well as the air bearing dynamics of the disk drive simultaneously. We observe that the response of the disk to the shock pulse is of critical importance and depends strongly on the pulse width of the shock pulse. We also find that if a suspension bending frequency is close to the first umbrella frequency of the disk, there can be failure of the head–disk interface due to resonance.