In a digital servo control system especially suitable for use in disk drives, a sample integrity tester is provided. Sample measurements, indicating the position of a disk drive's read/write head relative to tracks of information on a recording medium, are subject to error due to noise. The sample integrity tester 2410, 2420, 2430 effectively filters out noise-corrupted measurements and thus prevents clearly erroneous measurements from contaminating calculations performed within the servo controller's control loop. If a measured position signal falls outside a given window (indicating a possible spurious position value has been read), an observer's predicted value is used rather than the spurious value. Using the predicted value allows the loop to operate in a "freewheel" (open-loop) mode. A preferred implementation of the sample integrity tester involves a coarse window that is static, and a fine window that changes dynamically based on an effort signal.