Disclosed is a control system for processing sampled servo data in a disk drive. The control system includes a microprocessor and a servo processing accelerator circuit for performing operations on the sampled servo data while the microprocessor is executing firmware code. The accelerator circuit supports the use of a higher servo bandwidth thus allowing a higher track density resulting a greater storage capacity for the disk drive. Also, the accelerator circuit relieves the microprocessor of the ordinary servo processing function. Thus, the microprocessor's limited processing capacity to be directed to other controller and interface functions of the disk drive. Only under unusual conditions, such as a write-unsafe (WUS) limit exception, does the microprocessor need to direct processing capacity to the servo processing function. Further, the accelerator circuit may be a decreased response time after reading the servo data from the disk.