Patent ID: 6885514

Claim:
A method of manufacturing a disk drive formed from a head disk assembly (HDA) containing a plurality of magnetic surfaces, the HDA including at least one magnetic disk with at least one magnetic surface and a head stack assembly (HSA) that includes multiple transducer heads, each transducer head corresponding to a magnetic surface of a magnetic disk, each transducer head with a write element for writing data to the magnetic disk and a read element for reading data from the magnetic disk, the method comprising the steps of: mounting the HDA in a servo track writer and moving the HSA to desired positions over the magnetic disk; measuring a width of each read element of each transducer head with the servo track writer to establish a collection of read width measurements; measuring a width of the each write element of each transducer head with the servo track writer to establish a collection of write width measurements; determining a track pitch based on the collection of read element and write element width measurements; and writing servo tracks onto the magnetic disk at the determined track pitch.