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Expert has over 20 years of experience in the development of magnetic disks for hard disk drives. His early experience includes work with the spin coating of particulate disks for a number of rigid disk cartridges, packs, and fixed disk drives. His recent experience includes the development of plated and sputtered rigid media using any of numerous magnetic materials. He is familiar with all disk processes, including substrate machining and grinding, electroless nickel plating, grinding, polishing, cleaning, and sputtering a variety of underlayers (magnetic materials and top coats). He is also experienced with buffing, lubrication, burnishing, glide testing, and certification procedures. Expert was personally trained and worked with Dr. W. Edward Deming. He used Deming's concepts to improve disk yield and reduce process variation. He is also knowledgeable of statistical analysis and design of experiments, which he employed in the development of computer disks.

Over the course of several years, Expert was responsible for the development of 8-, 5-, and 3.5-inch floppy disks at Nashua Corporation. He was personally involved with selecting and qualifying diskette media in web and punched cookie format. He is familiar with all floppy disk specifications, testing, and the processing procedures of lamination, cutting, primary folding, punching, burnishing, certification, formatting, end folding, and packaging. He has worked with OEMs and end users in identifying and correcting floppy disk problems.

Expert has several years of experience developing and using dip coating technology for lubricating magnetic particulate and thin film disks. He developed extensive process control, surface characterization, and analytical measurement technology to maintain coating variations within Angstroms of the target thickness. He also applied this technology to coat organic photo-conductor (OPC) drums with three individual chemical firms.


Having worked with nearly all of the disk drive manufacturers worldwide (including extensive experience with those in Japan), Expert can answer a variety of questions on disk drive technology. As a supplier of media to these manufacturers, he was frequently asked to help solve disk drive problems. His experience includes contamination analysis and control, servo-writing, defect identification and analysis, and reliability testing and improvement. He has a working knowledge of CRC, ECC, error handling schemes, Weibull distribution analysis, and data interfaces. His most recent experience including the specification, testing and qualification of GMR heads and sputtered media for desktop hard disk drives.


Expert has extensive experience in writing Access and Excel macros for automatically gathering, analyzing, and graphing engineering data. An example was a one-page summary of a development work order that listed averages and standard deviations of 72 key variables. Hyperlinks were provided to allow instant access to over 50 graphs for further investigation of parameters that were of concern. A master summary of all work orders for a program was also updated whenever an individual work order was analyzed.

Expert collected production yield and variable data using Access. The data was analyzed using Excel and graphed using Excel or Jandel. Daily, weekly, and special reports were issued as required.He wrote Access and Excel macros for use by company employees to automate gathering and reformatting of error data. Expert supervised the writing of a magnetic tape test program. He analyzed and plotted resulting data to show performance differences of various tape drives and suppliers.