Quadruple-Stage Actuator System for Magnetic-Head Positioning System in Hard Disk Drives

In this article, we present a magnetic-head positioning system in hard disk drives (HDDs) with a quadruple-stage actuator system. The quadruple-stage actuator system consists of a voice coil motor, a milliactuator with two piezoelectric (PZT) elements, a microactuator with two PZT elements, and a thermal actuator. The milliactuator is the first generation of a secondary actuator for a dual-stage actuator in the HDDs and moves a sway mode of a suspension in a head-stack assembly. The microactuator is the second generation of the secondary actuator for the dual-stage actuator in the HDDs and moves a yaw mode of the suspension. The thermal actuator is an actuator in a development phase for future HDDs. It consists of heaters embedded in the magnetic head and moves read/write elements a few nanometers in a horizontal direction with thermal expansion. The achievable disturbance-rejection performance of the proposed quadruple-stage-actuator system is higher than that of the conventional triple-stage actuator system because the proposed system can decrease a negative impact caused by the stroke limitation of the thermal actuator. As a result, the magnetic-head positioning system with the quadruple-stage-actuator system enables us to improve the positioning accuracy under the external vibrations by about 48% from that with the triple-stage-actuator system.