The disturbance observer (DOB) has been widely utilized for high precision/speed motion control applications. However, it still lacks the analysis for the robustness and performance brought by using DOB. This paper proposes the robustness measure of DOB and reveals the relationships between the disturbance rejection performance and the order/time constant of a Q filter in DOB. Additionally, we propose six guidelines for the design of Q filter and show their validity through the experiments for DVD systems.