Western Digital Technologies, Inc.

Philip S Gordon

Guoxiao Guo

Jie Yu

Hanan Kupferman

Teik Ee Yeo

John W Vanlaanen

Prakash Balasubramaniam

Davide Giovenzana

Nalin H Chheda

Honge Wang

A disk drive is disclosed comprising a disk comprising a plurality of servo tracks defined by servo sectors. The disk drive further comprises a head comprising a read element offset linearly from a write element by a gap such that when the disk rotates, the read element reaches a servo sector before the write element. During a first operation, a first length of a beginning of the servo sector is read, and during a write operation, a second length of the beginning of the servo sector shorter than the first length is read to enable data to be written while the read element is over at least part of the servo sector.

Disk drive increasing capacity by adjusting a servo gate during write operations

A disk drive includes an actuator assembly having a read/write head, a spindle motor, a disk mounted for rotation on the spindle motor, a wedge-to-wedge timer and a sector size selector. The disk includes a recording surface having a plurality of tracks and each track includes a plurality of servo wedges. The recording surface has at least one data sector between circumferentially adjacent servo wedges on each track. The wedge to wedge timer measures the time elapsed between at least two successive detections of circumferentially adjacent servo wedges and outputs a wedge-to-wedge correction signal that is dependent upon the measured elapsed time. The sector size selector outputs a sector size signal that changes according to the wedge-to-wedge correction signal. In turn, the sector size signal determines the size of the next data sector on the recording surface of the disk.

Disk drive having adaptively-sized sectors to compensate for disk eccentricity

Format specific parameters may be selected in a disk drive comprising a control system and a plurality of disk surfaces each having a surface format for storing data, wherein at least one surface format is different than other surface formats and wherein the control system comprises a microcontroller having a microcontroller execution memory. The method for selecting these format specific parameters includes initializing the disk drive for operation, receiving a data transfer command, and selecting a disk surface for performing data transfer operations based on the received data transfer command. The method further includes generating a format specific data structure corresponding to the selected disk surface, storing the format specific data structure at a predetermined address in the microcontroller execution memory, and executing instructions for performing the data transfer operations using the microcontroller, wherein the instructions are executed using the stored format specific data structure.

Method for storing format specific data in a microcontroller execution memory

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Santa Ana, CA, United States of America

Philip S Gordon