Patent ID: 6995933

Claim:
A disk drive having drive operating characteristics, the disk drive comprising: (a) a disk; (b) a head actuated radially over the disk; (c) a programmable write driver for applying a write current to the head during write operations; (d) a disk controller for executing a write current optimization procedure by: obtaining an ambient temperature reading; programming the write driver with a first write current setting relating to the ambient temperature reading; writing test data to the disk; reading the test data from the disk and generating a first quality metric; programming the write driver with a second write current setting relating to the ambient temperature reading; writing test data to the disk; reading the test data from the disk and generating a second quality metric; and evaluating the first and second quality metrics to generate an optimized write current setting based on the drive operating characteristics and the ambient temperature reading, wherein: the optimized write current setting for copying to a plurality of disk drives; and each of the plurality of disk drives for generating a re-optimized write current setting in response to the optimized write current setting.