Modeling and Prediction of Structure-Borne Seek Noise of Hard Disk Drives

A numerical approach is presented for modeling and 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 calculations of structure-borne seek noise from a 1.8" HDD are conducted by using the developed numerical approach. The results reveal high dependency of the structure-borne seek noise on the current profile applied to VCM.