Electromagnetic interference (EMI) inside a hard disk drive Due to external ESD

GMR recording heads used in today's hard disk drives are very sensitive to damage from impulsive current transients caused by electrostatic discharge (ESD) and even the electromagnetic interference (EMI) due to a nearby ESD event.[1,2,3] In this work, we measure the EMI inside a hard disk drive due to a variety of ESD events outside the drive enclosure.