Aerodynamic vibration mechanism of HDD arms predicted by unsteady numerical simulations

Summary form only given. Concurrent with the increases in recording density and the advent of higher rotational speeds, the aerodynamic aspects of hard disk drives (HDDs) have become quite important. For further improvements of head positioning accuracy, it is necessary to reveal the aerodynamic mechanisms related to vibrations of the HDD arm. However, there have been only a few reports of investigations of the internal airflow near the arm. We have studied the aerodynamic phenomena occurring inside an HDD and the effect of arm shape upon airflow and arm disturbance torque by using an unsteady direct numerical simulation.