Head Instability Detection for Testing Process in Perpendicular Magnetic Recording System

During hard disk drive (HDD) testing process, the magneto-resistive read (MR) head is analyzed and checked if the head is defective or not. Baseline popping (BLP) is one of the crucial problems caused by head instability, whose effect can distort the readback signal to the extent of causing possible sector read failure. Without BLP detection algorithm, the defective read head might pass through HDD assembling process, thus producing an unreliable HDD. This situation must be prevented so as to retain customer satisfaction. This paper proposes a simple (but efficient) BLP detection algorithm for perpendicular magnetic recording systems. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional one in terms of both the percentage of detection and the percentage of false alarm, when operating at high signal-to-noise ratio.