Patent ID: 7139145

Claim:
A disk drive to perform cluster-based defect detection on a disk included within the disk drive, the disk drive comprising: a disk including a plurality of tracks, each track including servo wedges and data wedges; a moveable head to scan the tracks of the disk; a defect detection circuit to detect defects on the disk scanned by the moveable head; a microprocessor for controlling operations in the disk drive including cluster-based defect detection, the microprocessor under the control of a cluster detection program to: define a data scan window corresponding to an area of the disk scanned by the moveable head, the data scan window having an area defined by a number of tracks and data wedges; define a data cluster threshold corresponding to a minimum number of defects occurring within the data scan window; and identify a data defect cluster if the defect detection circuit detects that a number of defects within the data scan window exceeds the data cluster threshold, wherein for each defect of an identified data defect cluster, the data scan window is moved about each defect and other defects within the moved data scan window are identified, and the data defect cluster is then re-defined to include the other identified defects.