The Study of the Parameters that Affect the Performance of Suspension in HDD

The suspension in a hard disk drive is a component of hard disk drives (HDD(s)) that commonly consist of three main components; Baseplate, Loadbeam and Gimbal, which are welded together. The suspension is attached to a slider fly on the surface of a rapidly spinning disk. The suspension assembly and slider that is formed is called a Head Gimbal Assembly (HGA). If that assembly is not attached to the slider, that is called a Trace Gimbal Assembly (TSA). Defects in the suspension may occur from machining and assembly. The aim of this research is to study the effect of suspension defects on the performance of the suspension resonance using a finite element method, whereby the suspension was created by SolidWorks and imported into Ansys in order to conduct resonance analysis. The results from finite element analysis compared with laser doppler velocimetry (LDV) found that the trend is the same. The suspension bias was revealed, in that Delta RG, welding diameter, program asymmetry, program asymmetry, tip height and tip twist influence the performance of the suspension may possibly come from the suspension production process. Obviously, this process needs to be controlled with regard to certain aspects, such as laser power, fixtures and so on. However, the swaging process in the head stack assembly might also have an impact tin tip height and tip twist.