Abstract
The shock performance of hard disk drives has been a serious issue for portable computers and AV application HDD. Focusing on the motion of an actuator, we investigated non-operational shock mechanism and studied several parameters that affect the shock performance by experimental analysis. It was found that there are two important factors fort the actuator to endure high shock revel. One is a shock transmissibility and the other is a beating between the arm blade and the suspension. To generalize the shock transmissibility, the concept of shock response spectrum was introduced. The shock response spectrum of the actuator system was obtained experimentally and compared with that of an analytical single degree of freedom model. It was found that there was a good agreement. The first bending natural frequency of the arm blade was found to be the most important factor for the low shock transmissibility. By applying the shock response spectrum and avoiding the beating, we could design an actuator of high shock performance.