Celebrity Inventors
Actor Marlon Brando has four patents, all named "Drumhead tensioning device and method."
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| Number | Title | Issue Date |
| 6594183 | Wear leveling techniques for flash EEPROM systems A mass storage system made of flash electrically erasable and programmable read only memory ("EEPROM") cells organized into blocks, the blocks in turn being grouped into memory banks, is managed to even out the numbers of erase and rewrite cycles experien... | 07/15/2003 |
| 6208477 | Hard disk drive having a built-in self-test for measuring non-linear signal distortion In a hard disk drive, a semiconductor chip includes a circuit used in a built-in self test ("BIST") to determine an amplitude of a dibit echo for characterizing nonlinear distortion of a readback signal. Preferably, write precompensation is performed base... | 03/27/2001 |
| 6204988 | Disk drive capable of autonomously evaluating and adapting the frequency response of its servo control system The invention is a method of characterizing the frequency response of the servo control system in a disk drive having a sampled servo system having a sampling rate and a nominal bandwidth, wherein the sampled servo system comprises a plant and a servo con... | 03/20/2001 |
| 6205494 | Controller with automatic generation of linked list of data transfer descriptors for sequential commands, with linked list being used for execution of sequential data transfers A command queuing engine in a target controller ASIC automatically detects sequential commands received from an initiator and generates a linked list of data transfer descriptors for the sequential commands. The data transfer descriptors are automatically... | 03/20/2001 |
| 6200441 | Multiple station vacuum deposition apparatus for texturing a substrate using a scanning beam A stationary vacuum deposition machine for use in a method for processing substrates to make magnetic hard disks includes a series of stations and a transport. The series of stations includes an entrance station for receiving substrates into the machine a... | 03/13/2001 |
| 6198584 | Disk drive with staggered calibration bursts that are disposably located in data regions and method of using the same for calibrating a read head A disk drive with a disk having a servo pattern including a special "calibration track" wherein a plurality of staggered calibration burst pairs define null points that are radially shifted from a burst pair centerline by precise, predefined, fractional t... | 03/06/2001 |
| 6198590 | Disk drive employing method of spinning down its spindle motor to reduce the time required for subsequently spinning it up A disk drive employs a method of operating a spindle motor to respond to a spin-down command to reduce the time required for subsequently responding to a spin-up command. After receiving the spin-down command, and while the rotor continues to spin in the ... | 03/06/2001 |
| 6195218 | Disk drive which efficiently stores zone parameter sets for a plurality of disk surfaces A disk drive and method which efficiently stores zone parameter sets for a plurality of disk surfaces. The disk drive includes a disk control system and a plurality of disk surfaces. Each disk surface has an associated transducer head in communication wit... | 02/27/2001 |
| 6195222 | Disk drive with seek profile selection based on a queued vs. non-queued environment A disk drive and method of optimizing data access time by selecting a seek profile and/or settle criteria based on a queued or non-queued environment. The disk drive includes an actuator and a servo system, wherein the servo system is directed to move the... | 02/27/2001 |
| 6191909 | Polling a preamplifier within a disk drive to remotely determine pre-established parametric values A system for polling a preamplifier unit to remotely determine pre-established parametric values in a disk drive is disclosed. The disk drive comprises a controller, a preamplifier, and a plurality of transducers. The system for polling the preamplifier c... | 02/20/2001 |
| 6185067 | Disk drive with reduced thermal expansion induced disk slip A spindle motor for a disk drive includes a shaft, an aluminum hub, a bearing, a magnetic steel back iron, and a magnet. The hub includes an axial wall having an inner surface. The back iron has an upper portion and a lower portion. The hub is concentrica... | 02/06/2001 |
| 6185074 | Inertial latch having an interposer that prevents the head from leaving the ramp load during a shock event A disk drive includes a disk drive base, a head stack assembly pivotally coupled to the disk drive base, a ramp load coupled to the disk drive base for parking the head, and an inertial latch. The head stack assembly includes a head and a coil portion cou... | 02/06/2001 |
| 6181502 | Faster access time in a disk drive by utilizing increased VCM potential voltage A disk drive includes a voice coil motor (VCM) and a VCM power source circuit which is coupled to a standard power supply having a fixed voltage. During seek operations the VCM power source circuit provides a boosted voltage, greater than the fixed supply... | 01/30/2001 |
| 6178056 | Disk drive employing state variable trap registers for providing stored servo and user data state variables to sampled-data channel A disk drive includes a disk surface having a plurality of tracks arranged in an embedded servo format including servo track segments for storing servo data and data track segments for storing user data. The disk drive includes a read element operative du... | 01/23/2001 |
| 6175893 | High bandwidth code/data access using slow memory A read-only memory is connectable to a microcontroller data bus and address bus and includes memory circuits for storing a sequential array of code words executable by the microcontroller; memory address decoding circuits for selecting one of the array of... | 01/16/2001 |
| 6160368 | Faster spin-down operation in a disk drive by utilizing pulsed braking A disk drive includes a spindle motor having windings and a spindle motor driver including switching elements connected to the windings. Spin-down instructions are stored in a memory. A microprocessor is responsive to a spin-down command to receive and ex... | 12/12/2000 |
| 6151197 | Water slide suspension assembly having a stiffened vertically offset lift tab The disk includes a disk recording surface, and the ramp includes a ramp. A head stack assembly of a hard disk drive includes an actuator arm and a suspension assembly attached to the actuator arm. The suspension assembly includes a first elongated region... | 11/21/2000 |
| 6151189 | Disk drive spindle motor with embedded ionizing source for static charge dissipation A spindle motor for a disk drive includes a shaft, a stator, a hub, an upper bearing, a lower bearing, means for defining a gap and an ionization source. The stator is concentrically positioned about the shaft. The upper and lower bearings rotatably maint... | 11/21/2000 |
| 6147831 | Servo track writer having a servo writer positioning arm with a vibration damper and a method of making a head disk assembly A servo track writer for a head disk assembly and a method of making the head disk assembly using the servo track writer are disclosed. The head disk assembly includes an enclosure having an opening and a base and an actuator arm coupled to the base and h... | 11/14/2000 |
| 6145052 | Disk drive with adaptive pooling for command reordering A method for selecting a next command to execute from a set of SCSI commands where the commands are gracefully aged and performance of a disk drive is improved. An execution threshold age, a pool threshold age, and an age threshold age are used to determi... | 11/07/2000 |
| 6136403 | Buffered nitrogenated carbon overcoat for data recording disks and method for manufacturing the same A recording medium on a hard disk is provided that includes a magnetic data recording layer on the disk, a hydrogenated carbon buffer layer over the data recording layer, and a nitrogenated carbon overcoat layer over the hydrogenated carbon buffer layer. ... | 10/24/2000 |
| 6122133 | Hybrid method of determining a fractional track position of a read transducer in a hard disk drive A method used to implement a sampled servo control system in a magnetic disk drive for generating a fractional track portion of a position error signal to correctably maintain the alignment of a read transducer (or associated write transducer) relative to... | 09/19/2000 |
| 6122135 | Disk drive with voice coil motor rise time manager A method to adaptively reduce error introduced by the coil current rise time. A disk drive with a moving arm actuator driven by a voice coil motor is controlled by periodically modeling the coil current rise time. An adjustment to a commanded current valu... | 09/19/2000 |
| 6111717 | Disk drive comprising a programmable preamplifier including a multiplexer for selecting between internal digital signals for output to a terminal A disk drive comprising a plurality of read/write transducers, a programmable preamplifier, and a controller for furnishing control and data signals to the programmable preamplifier and for receiving data signals therefrom, is disclosed. The programmable ... | 08/29/2000 |
| 6101876 | Method of centering a disk pack of a disk drive A method of centering a disk pack on a base rotatably supporting the disk pack includes performing a series a steps while the disk pack is rotating. A reference timing signal is generated. A first imbalance in the rotating disk pack is detected, and a fir... | 08/15/2000 |
| 6104153 | Disk drive employing method of spinning down its spindle motor to reduce the time required for spinning it down and subsequently spinning it up A disk drive employs a method of operating a spindle motor to respond to a spin-down command to reduce the time required for spinning down and subsequently spinning up the spindle motor. The disk drive is connectable to a power supply having a fixed DC vo... | 08/15/2000 |
| 6105104 | Method and apparatus for optimizing the data transfer rate to and from a plurality of disk surfaces A method of mapping sequential logical data blocks to multiple disk surfaces. Data blocks are written to a predetermined number of adjacent tracks on each surface before performing a head switch to write data on another surface. The predetermined number o... | 08/15/2000 |
| 6101065 | Disk drive with seek profile selection based on read/write operation A method for reducing data access time in a disk drive. The disk drive includes an actuator and a servo controller. The servo controller commands the actuator to perform a seek from a current position to a target position using a profile of command effort... | 08/08/2000 |
| 6094707 | Method for memory allocation in a disk drive employing a chunk array and identifying a smallest available element for write caching The disk drive provides a method of adaptively managing a cache segment divided into chunks by defining an unavailable data type to be stored in an element of a chunk array which indicates that the chunk is not available, and defining an available data ty... | 07/25/2000 |
| 6094020 | Disk drive utilizing Bemf of spindle motor to increase VCM voltage during seeks A disk drive is connectable to a power supply having a fixed DC voltage. The disk drive includes a voice coil motor (VCM) and a spindle motor having a plurality of windings and a rotor rotatable at a variable spin-rate. A spindle motor driver is coupled t... | 07/25/2000 |
| 6092150 | Method for memory allocation in a disk drive employing a chunk array and identifying a first available element for write caching The disk drive provides a method of adaptively managing a cache segment divided into chunks by defining an unavailable data type to be stored in an element of a chunk array which indicates that the chunk is not available, and defining an available data ty... | 07/18/2000 |
| 6092149 | Disk drive cache system using a dynamic priority sequential stream of data segments continuously adapted according to prefetched sequential random, and repeating types of accesses A magnetic disk drive with a caching system includes an intelligent interface to communicate with a host, a magnetic disk and a cache memory to buffer data transferred to and from the host. The caching system maximizes drive performance based on past acce... | 07/18/2000 |
| 6091564 | Disk drive with calibration bursts that are recorded on a spiral and method of recording the same A disk drive with a disk having a servo pattern including a special "calibration track" wherein a plurality of calibration burst pairs are recorded on a spiral centerline to define null points that are radially shifted from a burst pair centerline by prec... | 07/18/2000 |
| 6081447 | Wear leveling techniques for flash EEPROM systems A mass storage system made of flash electrically erasable and programmable read only memory ("EEPROM") cells organized into blocks, the blocks in turn being grouped into memory banks, is managed to even out the numbers of erase and rewrite cycles experien... | 06/27/2000 |
| 6078452 | Disk drive employing method of writing a data block to a data sector following a defective servo sector A disk drive employs a method for writing a block of data (or multiple blocks of data) to a data region following a defective servo sectors. The disk drive includes a sampled head positioning servo system and a rotating disk with a plurality of data track... | 06/20/2000 |
| 6078453 | Method and apparatus for optimizing the servo read channel of a hard disk drive A method of deriving optimum read channel parameters for use in reading servo sector data from a disk drive having a head mounted on an actuator, a read channel including a preamplifier, a disk having a plurality of tracks, each track having multiple sequ... | 06/20/2000 |
| 6067206 | Method and apparatus to compensate for servo wedge rotational offset after a head switch A disk drive controller having a microprocessor and a sampled signal head positioning system measures and stores the relative rotational offsets between heads arranged in a stacked relationship and respective servo wedges on different disk surfaces. The o... | 05/23/2000 |
| 6065095 | Method for memory allocation in a disk drive employing a chunk array and identifying a largest available element for write caching The disk drive provides a method of adaptively managing a cache segment divided into chunks by defining an unavailable data type to be stored in an element of a chunk array which indicates that the chunk is not available, and defining an available data ty... | 05/16/2000 |
| 6061206 | Head stack assembly for a disk drive having a unitary molded plastic E-block A head stack assembly for mounting to a pivot bearing cartridge in a disk drive includes a coil having opposite electrical ends and a unitary molded plastic E-block fabricated from a first thermoplastic material containing electrically conductive filler m... | 05/09/2000 |
| 6052890 | Method of making a head disk assembly using a propagated light beam to detect a clearance between a disk and a head A method of making a head disk assembly using a fixture is disclosed. The head disk assembly includes a base having an interior-horizontal surface and a side wall extending in a direction substantially perpendicular to the horizontal surface, a disk for c... | 04/25/2000 |
