General Description; Figure 2. Cheetah 73Fc Disc Drive - Seagate Cheetah ST173404FC Product Manual

Cheetah 73FC Product Manual, Rev. C 5
3.0

General description

TM
Cheetah 73FC drives combine giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads, partial response/maximum likelihood
(PRML) read channel electronics, embedded servo technology, and a Fibre Channel interface to provide high
performance, high capacity data storage for a variety of systems including engineering workstations, network
servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.
Cheetah 73FC drives are random access storage devices designed to support the Fibre Channel Arbitrated
Loop (FC-AL) and SCSI Fibre Channel Protocol as described in the ANSI specifications, this document, and
the Fibre Channel Interface Manual (part number 77767496) which describes the general interface characteris-
tics of this drive. Cheetah 73FC drives are classified as intelligent peripherals and provide level 2 conformance
(highest level) with the ANSI SCSI-1 standard.
The head and disc assembly (HDA) is environmentally sealed at the factory. Air recirculates within the HDA
through a non-replaceable filter to maintain a contamination-free HDA environment.
See Figure 2 for an exploded view of the drive. Never disassemble the HDA. This exploded view is for informa-
tion only. Do not attempt to service items in the sealed enclosure (heads, media, actuator, etc.) as this requires
special facilities. The drive contains no parts replaceable by the user and opening the HDA for any reason
voids your warranty.
Figure 2. Cheetah 73FC disc drive
Cheetah 73FC drives use a dedicated landing zone at the innermost radius of the media to eliminate the possi-
bility of destroying or degrading data by landing in the data zone. The heads automatically go to the landing
zone when power is removed from the drive.
An automatic shipping lock prevents potential damage to the heads and discs that results from movement dur-
ing shipping and handling. The shipping lock disengages and the head load process begins when power is
applied to the drive.
Cheetah 73FC drives decode track 0 location data from the servo data embedded on each surface to eliminate
mechanical transducer adjustments and related reliability concerns.
The drives also use a high-performance actuator assembly with a low-inertia, balanced, patented, straight arm
design that provides excellent performance with minimum power dissipation.