Patent ID: 8922931

Claim:
A disk drive comprising: a disk comprising a plurality of servo tracks defined by servo sectors, wherein data tracks are defined relative to the servo tracks and the servo sectors define data wedges in the data tracks; a head actuated over the disk; and control circuitry operable to: receive write data from a host in connection with executing a write operation; buffer N data wedges of the write data in a buffer, where N is greater than one; after writing at least two of the data wedges to the disk including a first data wedge and a second data wedge, measure a first servo metric value when reading a first servo sector; predict a second servo metric value based at least partly on the first servo metric value, wherein the second servo metric value corresponds to a second servo sector following the first servo sector; when the first servo metric value indicates a safe write condition and the second servo metric value indicates an unsafe write condition, release the first data wedge from the buffer; and when the first servo metric value indicates a safe write condition and the second servo metric value indicates a safe write condition, release the first and second data wedges from the buffer.