Patent ID: 7269525

Claim:
A method of manufacturing disk drives comprising the steps of: (a) assembling a number of disk drives; (b) generating a plurality of quality metrics for each disk drive, wherein the quality metrics correspond to a plurality of operating characteristics; (c) evaluating the quality metrics for each disk drive for binning the disk drives into a plurality of lots including a first lot and a second lot; (d) performing a final quality audit (FQA) by executing a number of write and read operations for a plurality of the disk drives in each lot and classifying each disk drive as passing or failing the FQA; (e) if the number of disk drives out of the first lot that fail the FQA falls below a first threshold, classifying the first lot as acceptable for presenting to a first tier customer; and (f) if the number of disk drives out of the second lot that fail the FQA falls below a second threshold, classifying the second lot as acceptable for presenting to a second tier customer.