Optimizing order of error recovery steps in a disk drive

A disk drive comprising:

• a disk comprising a plurality of tracks, wherein each track comprises a plurality of data sectors;
• a head actuated over the disk;
• and
• disk control circuitry for executing an error recovery procedure comprising a plurality of error recovery steps, wherein each error recovery step having an execution time, the disk control circuitry for ordering the error recovery steps by:
• initializing a plurality of step success counters each corresponding to one of the error recovery steps;
• executing a plurality of the error recovery steps for a plurality of the data sectors, wherein if one of the error recovery steps successfully recovers one of the data sectors, incrementing the corresponding step success counter;
• computing a step priority value for each error recovery step in response to the step success counter and the execution time for each error recovery step;
• and
• ordering the error recovery steps in response to the step priority values.