Study of aerodynamic characteristics in hard disk drives by numerical simulation

The behavior of the air flow inside a hard disk drive is evaluated by a thr ee-dimensional unsteady-flow analysis technique called large eddy simulatio n (LES), The simulation shows that the fluctuation of the aerodynamic force is strongly correlated with the amplitude of the disk vibration, which cau ses positioning error of the read/write head. It also shows that the power loss caused by the friction of the air on the disks, which accounts for mos t of the power consumption of hard disk drives at a high-speed revolution, can be qualitatively predicted.