Fabrication method to achieve a high bandwidth at low cost for hard disk drive actuators

A fabrication method is proposed for hard disk drive actuators, with the ob jective of cutting manufacturing cost without bringing about degradation in performance. With the proposed method, individual arms are first machined and then glued together with spacers in between. Finite-element method anal yses have been carried out on a generic two-arm actuator, with particular a ttention paid to the sway and torsion modes, as they have much influence on the achievable TPI (tracks per inch) of hard disk drives. It has been foun d from the present study that the torsion and sway frequencies suffer a dro p of approximately 6% and 3%, respectively, making the proposed fabrication method a practicable option for any cost-reduction endeavor.