摘要 |
Method and apparatus for writing timing based (servo) tracks on magnetic recording tape using complementary servo writer pairs. A magnetic tape intended to store, for instance, computer data conventionally contains servo tracks in addition to the data tracks. Typically many servo tracks and data tracks are arranged laterally across the width of the tape. The adjacent servo tracks (bands) here are complementary in terms of the orientation of their stripes and are written (recorded) by a complementary arranged servo writer pair. This advantageously reduces the position error signal by a substantial amount, even to nearly zero. In one version the servo writers are straight in configuration and in another version they are curved or chevron shape. These complementary servo writer pairs write adjacent servo bands. This takes advantage of the fact that typical servo technology, for instance in the LTO tape format, uses two servo heads, a top and bottom servo head, and averages the position error signal of the top and bottom servo read heads in the tape drive to determine the position error. By writing the servo tracks as described here, this error as written-in is substantially reduced. This is because the top and bottom servo sensors interpret the complementary aspect as being position error signal error in opposite directions, which thereby cancels out.
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