Evaluating 2.5" Hard Disk Drive Noise Source Identification

2.5" Hard Disk Drive (HDD) has been used widely in many consumer electronic devices such as laptop computer. It consists of a spindle motor, a voice coil motor and other mechanical components enclosed in a small aluminum mechanical casing. It is very challenging to perform noise control for such a small complex system. Convention approach of using frequency analysis is not sufficient to identify the noise source from the HDD. In this paper, we demonstrate a way to determine the noise source for 2.5" HDD using field measurement of the HDD to locate the noise source with near field microphone array and ANSYS software to compute the components that have the largest contribution to the sound.