Patent ID: 7224543

Claim:
A method for reducing off-track writes in a disk drive, said method comprising the steps of: receiving a command to perform a write operation to write data onto a disk surface at a first location using a write head; determining whether to inhibit writing of said data at said first location by predicting a position of said write head at said first location using an equation having a tunable acceleration coefficient, wherein the equation is given by: {circumflex over (p)} β (k+1)=(2+β)p(k)−(1+2β)p(k−1)+βp(k−2), where {circumflex over (p)}(k+1) is the predicted position of the write head at servo sector k+1, p(k) is a measured position of the write head at servo sector k, p(k−1) is a measured position of the write head at servo sector k−1, p(k−2) is a measured position of the write head at servo sector k−2, and β is the tunable acceleration coefficient.