Flow induced slider vibration in a functional HDDI: Influence of air shroud

An air shroud is designed and placed within a commercially available hard disk drive operating at 15000 rpm. Turbulent air flow characteristics resulting from both the models, with and without air shroud, are compared and discussed. The wind blowing on the surfaces of the head gimbals assembly is converted into aerodynamic forces and the resulting positioning error due to off-track and out-of-plane displacements of various sliders are investigated. It is inferred the disk drive model with air shroud resulted in 21% and 40% less off-track and out-of-plane displacements respectively.