US 7,064,920 B2 · Disk drive and breather filter having multiple ventilation paths and method of inspecting same

Abstract

A disk drive has an internal breather filter that performs a filtration function while maintaining ventilation with an exterior of the drive. The filter circulates a gas between an interior and the exterior of its enclosure. The enclosure includes a first ventilation path for circulating the gas from the exterior to the filter, and a second ventilation path for circulating the gas from the filter to the exterior. In addition, a method of inspecting the filter and disk drive is disclosed. The method includes a compressing and decompressing step of compressing and decompressing the inside of the enclosure, a measuring step of measuring pressure in the enclosure, and a judging step of judging whether attachment of the filter is adequate on the basis of a value of the pressure measured.

Claims10

Dependent claims

A disk drive apparatus, comprising:

a disk-like medium that is rotatably driven with centering about a rotating shaft and stores data;
an actuator that has a head, which reads data from and writes data to the disk-like medium, and swings with centering about a rotating shaft;
an enclosure containing the disk-like medium and the actuator;
a filter attached to the enclosure for filtering gas circulated between an inside of the enclosure and an outside;
and
said enclosure including first and second ventilation paths for circulating gas between the outside and the filter wherein said second ventilation path is formed in an area in which the filter is attached and is a different path than said first ventilation path.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Disk drive and breather filter having multiple ventilation paths and method of inspecting same

Life of this patent

Disk drive and breather filter having multiple ventilation paths and method of inspecting same

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims10