1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to digital information storage, and more particularly, to a method for adjusting a delay time for opening a servo sector detection window in a disk drive.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A magnetic disk drive provides a nonvolatile disk media for storage of user and application information. The disk media is generally formatted to store the information in concentric rings or tracks. The concentric tracks are followed using embedded servo wedges that are sampled during disk access operations. To switch from one track to another, the disk drive must perform a mechanical seek operation to move a transducer head to the desired track. During a seek, the stored in formation may not be accessed. When the disk drive is providing streaming media information, such as a video or audio information, to a host, the information must be buffered to prevent annoying discontinuities during playback of the streaming media. Also, to increase the storage capacity of the disk drive, the disk media may be divided into zones, with more uniformly-sized data blocks being written between the servo wedges on the outer tracks than are written between the servo wedges on the inner tracks. Nevertheless, the linear circumferential distance of a track wires as its radial distance from the center of the disk varies. Thus, a substantial number of the tracks often have a portion that is unused because it is smaller that the uniformly-sized data blocks. Alternatively, the tracks may have data blocks that straddle servo wedges using techniques requiring increased format overhead.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a disk drive and related techniques for using a magnetic disk media format that efficiently stores information and that allows more continuous information playback from a magnetic disk. The present invention satisfies this need.