Numerical investigation of airflow inside a 1-in hard disk drive

Abstract

The increasing application of the hard disk drive in consumer electronic devices has pushed the usage of the small form factor hard drives. At the same time, the data storage industry continues to enhance the capacity and performance of computer hard disk drive. The concerns of track mis-registration caused by various runout still remain with the form factor change. The objective of the current study is to numerically investigate the airflow characteristic inside a 1 in hard disk drive. The simulation model is constructed based on the currently available 1-in micro-drive in the market, with 3600 rpm disk rotation speed, thus the flow Reynolds number based on the disk tip radius is around 4.8×10 3. Two models with different actuator arm positions (outside and middle-disk) were studied. The simulation results show that the standard k-epsilon model used allows us to extract similar information and understanding as that from more developed numerical model. Good agreement in normalized velocity magnitude and flow pattern is observed between the numerical and experimental results. At different actuator arm positions, streamlines and velocity vectors plots show the effect of the actuator arm position to the flow pattern, especially around the arm. This arm position also affects the radial and tangential shear stress values over the disk, which may help to estimate the wind loss and power consumption.