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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 37, NO. 2, MARCH 2001

Acceleration Feedforward Control Against Rotational Disturbance in Hard Disk Drives

Akihide Jinzenji, Tatsuro Sasamoto, Koichi Aikawa, Susumu Yoshida, and Keiji Aruga

AbstractWe have developed an acceleration feedforward control for hard disk drives by using dual piezoelectric accelerometers. The dual accelerometers detect angular acceleration in the hard disk drive (HDD) and compensate for its negative effects. For optimum compensation we introduced the use of a phase compensation filter (PCF). Using this controller, the rejection capability against rotational disturbance is improved and HDD performance does not decrease even under the severest conditions: for example, in a disk array system that has the severest mechanical interaction between HDDs. Index TermsData storage, disk array, disturbance rejection, feedforward compensation, hard disk drive, phase compensation, piezoelectric accelerometer, position error.

I. INTRODUCTION ODERN HDDs have been developed for higher data recording density and faster data access. Their track widths have become narrower and the seek-reaction force of their actuator has become increasing. Under these circumstances, external disturbances such as a vibration tend to badly affect the positioning accuracy of readwrite heads. Especially in disk array systems that multiple HDDs are mounted in one box, mechanical interaction between the HDDs is the worst problem for the head positioning accuracy, similar to the problem of dual linear actuators [1]. One solution is to analyze and improve HDD mounting systems [4]. Another solution is an acceleration feedforward control that cancels the effect of external disturbance [3]. We implemented an acceleration feedforward control (AFC) in modern HDDs and evaluated the AFC in more practical situation. We also introduce the new method for designing the AFC controller to improve the effect of the AFC. II. HEAD POSITIONING ACCURACY AGAINST EXTERNAL DISTURBANCE The disturbances that occur in HDDs are divided into two categories: internal and external. Internal disturbances include air-induced vibration and resonance of the spindle motor, disks, and the arm. The level of internal disturbance depends on the characteristics of the HDD and is measured as total run-out

Fig. 1. Position error level caused by a 30 rad/s rotational vibration and position accuracy margin for external disturbance. The position accuracy margin for external disturbance is assumed to be 6.75% of track width. The rotational disturbance level of 30 rad/s is one example, but we have confirmed that there is a disk array system that has vibrations of more than 40 rad/s rotational disturbance caused by the seek reaction of HDDs.

Manuscript received November 22, 2000. The authors are with H.D.D. Division, Storage Products Group, Fujitsu Limited, 4-1-1 Kamikodanaka, Nakahara, Kawasaki, 211-8588, Japan (e-mail: jin@cs.fujitsu.co.jp). Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9464(01)02536-5.

(TRO), which is the amplitude of the position error signal (PES) when the HDD is rigidly fixed. External disturbances are mostly vibrations of the HDD. Moreover, their levels are different according to the circumstances where the HDD is set up. The HDD has write-inhibit slice that is the maximum position error level that an HDD controller determines to write data to a track. The difference between the TRO and write-inhibit slice is the margin for external disturbance. To maintain the position error caused by external disturbance within this margin under severe external disturbances, we must raise the servo loop gain. One method to raise this gain is to expand the servo bandwidth. Fig. 1 shows the position error level caused by a 30 rad/s rotational vibration at each frequency. Based on this figure, the controller with wider bandwidth makes the position error level caused by rotational disturbances smaller. The wider bandwidth controller, however, requires higher sampling frequencies so that the larger part of the disk surface must be used for servo information. The possibility to excite mechanical resonance also rises. To solve the disadvantages of expanding the bandwidth, we apply an AFC to HDDs. Using the AFC, we can sufficiently reduce the position error level against rotational disturbance without expanding the servo bandwidth, as shown in Fig. 1.

00189464/01$10.00 2001 IEEE

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Fig. 2. Mechanism correcting off-track heads caused by rotational disturbance, and basic AFC.

III. ACCELERATION FEEDFORWARD CONTROL A. Basis of AFC Fig. 2 is a simple diagram for explaining AFC. As an HDD is vibrated rotationally, the disks that are fixed to the base of the HDD vibrate along with the base, as shown by the dashed lines in the figure. But the readwrite heads that are fixed on one side of the rotary actuator dont move because of the action of the bearing between the base and the actuator. Thus, a relative distance is set between a readwrite head and the centerline of the target track on the disk. Basically, the AFC works so that the rotary actuator is moved by the same angular acceleration as that of the HDD measured by two accelerometers. In this method, the relative distance caused by external disturbance is canceled and becomes almost zero. The AFC works in addition to conventional feedback controller for canceling only the effects of external rotational vibration. Therefore, the feedback controller need not be redesigned for the AFC. B. Detection of Angular Acceleration and Implementation of AFC To measure the angular acceleration of an HDD, we used two single-axis piezoelectric accelerometers. An advantage of this accelerometer is low cost. However, there is a disadvantage that the sensitivity of the accelerometers varies widely. The difference of the sensitivities of the two accelerometers causes degradation for the control accuracy of the AFC. This effect is examined in Section III-D. The two accelerometers are mounted on the printed circuit board of the HDD. Their sensitivity axes are aligned parallel . Fig. 3 is a picture of the accelerometers that wit a gap mounted on a printed circuit board. Their measured values are defined as [m/s ] and [m/s ], [rad/s ], of an HDD is given by so the angular acceleration,
Fig. 3. Accelerometers on printed circuit board.

Fig. 4.

AFC.

pre-driver that converts the control value to VCM current and moves the actuator as the controller commands. C. Phase Compensation Filter Fig. 4 is a block diagram of the AFC that we implemented. is the gain by which the current is converted into the acceleration. 1/s is the transfer function from acceleration to posiis the inertia tion. is the conventional feedback controller. is the vibration characteristic ratio of actuator to the HDD. of the environment where the HDD is set up. The rotational disturbance and the seek-reaction force of the via . To HDD are added as acceleration disturbance , the feedforward controller measures cancel the effect of by using the dual accelerometers and moves the actuator . at the feedforward control acceleration, is equal to , the effect of is canIdeally, if to because celed. However, a phase shift occurs from , , and . indicates the transfer of several factors: function of analog filters, including low-pass filters that remove the effect of accelerometer resonance and high-pass filters that means the time delay of calculations. remove the DC bias. indicates the transfer function of the power amplifier. This phase shift reduces the effect of disturbance rejection by AFC. to , we used a To compensate the phase shift from in Fig. 4. phase compensation filter (PCF), represented as

Each accelerometer output is filtered by a low-pass filter to remove the effect of its resonance, before it is inputted to a digital signal processor (DSP) via an A/D converter. The DSP calculates the angular acceleration of the HDD from the above two measured values, and decides the feedforward control value. Then the DSP adds that value to the actuator control value generated by a conventional feedback controller. Finally, the DSP outputs the actuator control value to the voice coil motor (VCM)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 37, NO. 2, MARCH 2001

Fig. 5.

Phase compensation filter.

Fig. 7. Frequency response from angular acceleration (Acc.) of an HDD to PES [m/(rad/s )] (simulation).

Fig. 6 Transfer function from 

to 

with and without PCF.

Fig. 8.

Effect of AFC gain shift. TABLE I SPECIFICATIONS OF EXPERIMENTAL HDD

The PCF is implemented as a digital filter that processed by the DSP. The PCF is designed so that the gain and phase shifts from to become zero at specific frequencies. The order of the PCF is chosen as small as possible to minimize calculation time for filtering process. Fig. 5 is a Bode diagram of the PCF that we designed. The PCF is designed to make AFC more effective against rotational vibrations of about 200 Hz and 500 Hz. The transfer function of the PCF is given by

This filter is converted to a discrete-time system by using bilinear transformation and implemented as a digital filter. Fig. 6 to with and without the is the transfer function from PCF. Using the PCF, the phase shift is improved and become almost zero in a range of 200 Hz to 600 Hz. Fig. 7 shows the frequency response from the angular acceleration of the HDD to the PES in a simulation. Using only AFC, the frequency response has the lowest gain at about 300 Hz, but gain levels at 200 Hz and 500 Hz are not sufficiently low. By also PCF, gain decreases at 200 Hz and 500 Hz, as expected.

Fig. 9. Frequency response from the angular acceleration of an HDD to PES [m/(rad/s )] (experiment).

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TABLE II CONDITIONS FOR MEASURING IOPS

Fig. 11.

General disk array system.

Fig. 12.

PES power spectrum with and without AFC in disk array system.

two accelerometers are different, the angular acceleration calculated from the two outputs of the accelerometers shifts from the real angular accelerometer. As a result, the feedforward control value shifts at the same ratio. This shift is equivalent to the gain shift of the feedforward control. We simulated the effect of the AFC that has a gain shift. The sensitivity shift, a specification of the accelerometer, is 15%. The results are shown in Fig. 8. The feedforward compensation gain shift brings the decrease of the disturbance rejection capability of the AFC. But compared with that of using the feedback controller without AFC, the capability of disturbance rejection is sufficiently improved from 5 dB to 20 dB using the feedback controller with AFC. IV. EXPERIMENT RESULTS We implemented an AFC with PCF to an HDD with the dual piezoelectric accelerometers and examined the effect of AFC in several experiments. The specifications of experimental HDD are listed in Table I. The PCF was designed so that the AFC would work effectively against rotational disturbances at about 200 Hz and 500 Hz, those are the resonance frequencies of the disk array system used in the experiment described in Section IV-B. A. Effects Against Rotational Vibration To examine the effect of the AFC against rotational vibration, we measured the frequency response from the angular acceleration of the HDD to the PES. The measured HDD was

Fig. 10. Comparison of IOPS ratio against rotational vibration amplitude with and without AFC.

D. Effect of Difference Between Sensitivities of Two Accelerometers As mentioned in Section III-B, the sensitivity of the accelerometer that we used varies widely. If the sensitivities of the

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Fig. 13.

Comparison of PES time trace in disk array system. The worst PES is the time trace whose maximum amplitude is the biggest in 1024 samples.

set on a rotational vibration generator and vibrated rotationally at 20 rad/s . The measured frequency band was in a range of 50 Hz to 1 kHz. We evaluated three kinds of controllers: a conventional feedback controller, a feedback controller with AFC, and a feedback controller with AFC and PCF. The results are shown in Fig. 9. Compared with the conventional feedback controller, the feedback controller with AFC decreased PES by a range of 5 dB to 15 dB, and the feedback controller with AFC and PCF decreased PES by a range of 5 dB to 20 dB. Moreover, we confirmed that AFC with PCF worked effectively against the rotational vibrations at about 200 Hz and 500 Hz as expected. We evaluated the AFC according to inputoutput per second (IOPS). IOPS is the number of times data are read or written in one second. Table II lists the conditions for measuring IOPS. If an HDD is vibrated and the position error becomes greater than the write-inhibit slice, the disk controller must interrupt data writing and wait until the position error becomes small. As a result, more time is spent to write data to the disk, and the disk performance decreases. We measured the ratio of IOPS against rotational vibration amplitude. The results are shown in Fig. 10 for three vibration frequencies: 100 Hz, 200 Hz, and 500 Hz. The evaluated controllers were the feedback controllers with and without AFC and PCF. Using the feedback controller without AFC and PCF, the IOPS values decreased by more than 20% at 100 rad/s for all the measured frequencies. On the other hand, by adding the use of AFC and PCF, the IOPS values decreased by less than 5% at 200 rad/s .

These results indicate that the AFC is very effective against rotational vibration, and the PCF improves the effect of the AFC at the desired frequencies. B. Effects in Disk Array System Fig. 11 is a general disk array system that can be equipped with multiple HDDs. Most of disk array systems have mechanical resonances at several-hundred hertz, so that the HDD mounter vibrates at these frequencies if an external force is applied to the mounter. The conventional feedback controller cant suppress the disturbances enough at these frequencies, so the positioning accuracy of the HDD becomes worse. We performed an experiment in a certain disk array system to evaluate the AFC in more practical situation. In the experiment, we used one measuring HDD and the other random-seeking HDDs. The evaluated controllers were the feedback controllers with and without AFC and PCF. We compared the positioning accuracy of the measuring HDD using each controller while the other HDDs were performing on-tracking or random-seek operations. Fig. 12 shows a PES power spectrum with and without AFC, when the other HDDs were seeking at random. The PES power spectrum without AFC had two peaks at 200 Hz and 500 Hz. These peaks are caused by the resonances of the HDD mounter. With AFC, these two peaks were almost removed and the positioning accuracy was improved. Fig. 13 shows time traces of PES with and without AFC, when the other HDDs were performing on-tracking or random-seek operations. Without AFC and PCF, the amplitude of PES time trace with vibrations was about three times as large as that without vibrations. With AFC and PCF, however,

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of 6.5% to 12.7% because of the mechanical vibration caused by the seek reaction forces of the other HDDs. With AFC and PCF, however, the performance almost recovered or improved, changing within a range of % to 8.3%. These results demonstrate that the AFC works effectively in practical situations, such as in disk array systems. V. CONCLUSION We have developed and implemented an acceleration feedforward controller with the phase compensation filter using two low-cost piezoelectric accelerometers for HDD. The phase compensation filter that we applied to the AFC has improved the rejection capability of the HDD against rotational disturbance and we were able to design the controller flexibly by modifying the phase compensation filter. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to reduce mechanical interaction between HDDs and to improve IOPS of each HDD in disk array system. REFERENCES
[1] K. Aruga, Y. Mizoshita, M. Iwatsubo, and T. Hatagami, Acceleration feedforward control for head positioning in magnetic disk drives, JSME Int. J., ser. III, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 3541, 1990. [2] K. Aruga, T. Yamada, K. Imamura, and Y. Mizoshita, A study on head positioning accuracy in magnetic disk drives with a rotary head actuator (positioning error caused by flexible mounting) (in Japanese), in Proc. JSME, vol. C, 1990, pp. 463465. [3] M. T. White and M. Tomizuka, Increased disturbance rejection in Magnetic disk drives by acceleration feedforward control, in Proc. IFAC, vol. O, 1996, pp. 489494. [4] M. Suwa and K. Aruga, Evaluation system for residual vibration from HDD mounting mechanism, IEEE Trans. Magn., vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 868873, 1999.

Fig. 14. IOPS at any six positions of the disk array system under severe disturbance. The 100% IOPS is the performance level of HDD that set under little vibration.

the amplitudes with and without vibrations were mostly at the same level. We also compared IOPS with and without AFC and PCF in the disk array system and examined the effect of AFC and PCF on disk performance. One measuring HDD was set at one position in the disk array system. The other HDDs were seeking at random while IOPS was measured. The conditions for measuring IOPS were the same as those listed in Table I. Fig. 14 shows the IOPS ratio against the original IOPS that was measured when the other HDDs were performing on-tracking operations, at six positions of the disk array system. Without AFC and PCF, disk performance decreased by a range