Comparative Analysis among Single-Stage, Dual-Stage, and Triple-Stage Actuator Systems Applied to a Hard Disk Drive Servo System

In modern times, the design and optimization of different actuator systems for controlling a high-precision position control system represent a popular interdisciplinary research area. Initially, only single-stage actuator systems were used to control most of the motion control applications. Currently, dual-stage actuation systems are widely applied to high-precision position control systems such as hard disk drive (HDD) servo systems. In the dual-stage system, a voice coil motor (VCM) actuator is used as the primary stage and a piezoelectric micro-actuator is applied as the secondary stage. However, a dual-stage control architecture does not show significant performance improvements to achieve the next-generation high-capacity HDD servo system. Research continues on how to fabricate a tertiary actuator for a triple-stage HDD servo system. A thermal positioning controller (TPC) actuator is considered promising as the tertiary stage. The triple-stage system aims to achieve greater bandwidth, track density, and disk speed, with minimum sensitivity and greater error minimization. In this work, these three actuation systems with different combinations of proportional plus integral (PI), proportional plus derivative (PD), and proportional plus integral plus derivative (PID) controller, lag-lead controller, lag filter, and inverse lead plus a PI controller were designed and analyzed through simulation to achieve high-precision positioning. The comparative analyses were done on the MATLAB/Simulink simulation platform.