Apparatus and method for aligning a rotatable substrate to a support mechanism to write a feature to the substrate, and a substrate so configured. In some embodiments, the substrate has a circumferentially extending timing pattern with spaced apart first and second timing marks disposed on opposing sides of a center point of the timing pattern and an identification (ID) field that stores a unique identifier value associated with the substrate. Upon mounting of the substrate to a support mechanism that rotates the substrate about a central axis that is offset from the center point, a control circuit generates a compensation value to compensate for the offset using the first and second timing marks and outputs a process instruction to authorize processing of the substrate using the unique identifier value. In some cases, the unique identifier value is used as a lookup to a computerized database.