All drive interface test equipment available today can thoroughly test a drive and pass or fail it for a particular parameter or parameters. However, while testing drives this way provides data about the individual drive being tested, it does not provides statistical information about the overall manufacturing process. In today’s high volume drive-manufacturing environment, keeping tabs on trends in the process may be the only way to later prevent a catastrophic failure in the process. To understand if the manufacturing process is running correctly, certain data returned by the drive test must be uploaded to a server in near real-time for statistical process control (SPC). If data for a large number of drives is drifting in the wrong direction or falls outside an acceptable range, adjustments can be made to the process or material before individual drives began to fail in mass. Flexstar’s FlexBase is the first critical step in the process of statistical process control.
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