Thin film servo head employing the inactive transducer coils to cancel write noise from nearby data heads

Claim 1

A disk drive servo flyer with noise reduction means comprising: a flyer having a pair of spaced skis extending along the length of the flyer; each of the skis having an air bearing surface for flying closely adjacent the surface of a magnetic servo disk; a pair of thin film transducers mounted on one end of the flyer, one transducer attached to each ski; each of said thin film transducers having a coil; each of coils wound in a direction from the other such that electrical noise generated from nearby data read/write heads during writing on a respective magnetic data disk; induces substantially equal and opposite signals in said coils; a pair of leads connected to each coil at respective coil ends; a pair of pads for interconnection to circuitry external to said flyer; each of said leads of each coil connected to a respective pad such that the respective leads of each coil are interconnected through the respective pads, thereby forming a continuous circuit having at one ski a coil wound in one direction and at the other ski a coil wound in the opposite direction such that the amount of current induced by ambient noise in one of the thin film transducers is cancelled by a substantially equal and opposite current induced in the other of said thin film transducers; each of said thin film transducers further having a magnetic flux conducting core with a pair of pole tips extending toward the air bearing surface of said respective skis; the pole tips of one of said thin film transducers spaced sufficiently far from its ski air bearing surface so as to not be able to detect magnetic flux from said servo disk adjacent the respective ski at a signal level substantially greater than the ambient noise level, thereby disabling and rendering inactive said one transducer for reading data from said servo disk; and the pole tips of the other of said pair of thin film transducers extending to said ski air bearing surface so as to be able to detect magnetic flux from said servo disk adjacent the respective ski at a signal level substantially greater than and including the ambient noise level, thereby enabling and rendering active the other of said pair of transducers for reading data from said servor disk; whereby the servo flyer may be centrally located in a disk platter assembly close to a data read/write head, remain substantially unaffected by the noise created by said data read/write head when it writes onto said magnetic data disk and still read servo data from only one track on a servo data surface by means of said active thin film transducer.