Abstract
The key task for the spindle motor in a hard disk drive is to provide stable, reliable and consistent turning power for many years to allow the hard drive to function properly. As hard disks become more advanced, virtually every component in them is required to do more & perform better, and the spindle motor is no exception. Increasing the rotational speed at which the platters spin means that the data can be read off the disk faster, and also reduces rotational latency, the time that the heads must wait for the correct sector number to come under the head. For this reason, there has been a push to increase the speed of the spindle motor. Since the launching of hydro-dynamic bearing spindle technology for high speed application will not be in due course, current ball bearing technology will still be around for a couple of years provided the spindle speed does not exceed around 15 Krpm. Therefore optimizing the steel balls in the spindle system is an alternative to deal with the ever-increasing performance requirements of the hard disk drive. To accomplish this, we have to understand the failure phenomenon in the spindle, thereby set test requirements to overcome the failure mechanism. These test requirements will help us to understand the performance characteristic and robustness of the spindle motor.
In this paper, the test requirements is set according to modal, load and vibration methods to quantify the hard disk drive ball bearing spindle motor.
