AbstractThis paper presents a new technique for track‐following control in hard disk drives, in order to achieve high tracking precision of magnetic read–write headsuniformlyfor a huge number of disk drives. The basic idea in this technique is to classify the disk drives into several sets depending on dynamics properties, and to apply a robust controller to each set. The problem of designing the optimal classification of dynamics and the corresponding optimal robust controllers is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem, for which sub‐optimal solutions are to be found numerically. A numerical simulation shows the usefulness of the proposed technique by illustrating a tracking performance improvement. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.