Modeling and prediction of structure-borne seek noise of HDDs

A numerical approach is presented for predicting the structure-borne seek noise in hard disk drives (HDDs) in time-domain. Rayleigh integral is adopted to relate the transient acceleration of top cover to its radiated sound pressure. A finite element modeling and simulation technique is employed to arrive at the transient vibration response, which is further used as the input for acoustic noise level calculation. The prediction results of a 1.8” HDD reveal the high dependency of structure-borne seek noise level on the current profile applied to VCM.