The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 19, 1999
Filed:
Mar. 26, 1997
Tetsuo Ueda, Sagamihara, JP;
Atsushi Tobari, Fujisawa, JP;
Yoshihiro Nakagawa, Ebina, JP;
Kazushige Okutsu, Fujisawa, JP;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides a method and apparatus to efficiently switch heads in a disk drive. A disk drive comprises a plurality of recording surfaces and a plurality of heads and each head is opposed to a recording surface. The heads are used for reading data from or writing data to the plurality of recording surfaces. An offset quantity table stores an offset quantity for each of the plurality of heads. The offset quantity is a value representative of the distance of a head with respect to a reference head. A head sequence table stores a predetermined head switching sequence. Head switching operations use the head switching sequence stored in the head sequence table.