Evaluation of Vibration Characteristics of Suspensions for Hard Disk Drives and Reducing the Vibration by Using Viscoelastic Dampers

The vibration of suspensions of hard disk drives must be reduced if track density is to be increased. To reduce the vibration of the slider in the tracking direction caused by airflow, which is called windage, we used the FEM to analyze the vibration characteristics of suspensions. Deformations of load beams after the loading of disks are considered. Excitation force in the vertical direction is added to the suspensions as the substitute of fluid force. Our analysis showed that the vibration characteristics of suspensions change when the load beam profiles change, that viscoelastic dampers can reduce the windage sensitivity of the first torsion mode to Z-height, that the sensitivity of a suspension that has a large damper with stainless steel coverplate and from which part of the flange has been cut is only 1/20 that of the same suspension without dampers.