Method and apparatus for certifying servo sectors on recording surfaces of a disc stack of a data storage device to promote servo sector alignment among the various recording surfaces. A reference servo sector pattern is written to a first recording surface, the reference pattern comprising a plurality of angularly spaced apart servo sectors. Multiple interleaved sets of servo sector patterns are written to each of the remaining recording surfaces, each interleaved pattern respectively comprising a plurality of angularly spaced apart servo sectors. A selected interleaved pattern is identified from each of the remaining surfaces that provides a desired alignment with the reference servo sector pattern, and the non-selected servo sector patterns are overwritten. The servo patterns can be written to the discs prior to installation using a multiple disc writing (MDW) station, or after installation of the discs into the data storage device using a servo track writing (STW) station.