This paper investigates the design of disturbance observer for rotational vibration suppression in disk drive systems. The design aims to provide an optimal controller which satisfies both vibration performance and robust stability. It consists of an inversion method, a special filter, and optimization scheme. Firstly a new inversion method is introduced, which provides more accurate inversion compared to conventional zero phase error method. The inversion is to deal with unstable zeros in the plant model. Secondly a special filter for disturbance selection is given, which features adjustable gain and band pass characteristics so that it enables flexible shaping of the loop considering the trade-off between performance and stability margins. And finally the parameters of disturbance observer are optimized in conjunction with external disturbance model. Simulation and experiment on commercial hard disk drives confirm that the design is very effective to such disturbance which is hard to be handled by conventional approach.