Hard drive platters and partitioning

[The Keeper]

A hard drive usually has more than one platter these days, and each of these platters have their own read and write heads.

If you have a modern hard drive with two platters and you create 5 partitions.
1) Do all 5 partitions use sectors from both platters?
or
2) Do the first two partitions use the first platter, first half of the third partition use first platter and the latter half second platter and last two partitions the second platter?

Thanks for any info on the matter. 🙂

 

[Kirby64]

Not quite sure how it'd work exactly with sectoring, but it only reads from one platter at a time, so there's really no point. It's not going to slow down or speed up based on how you partition it, if that's what you're getting at.

 

[The Keeper]

That so? Blah, I thought modern hard drive platter heads would be independent of each other. 🙁

 

[sutahz]

Have you taken apart a HDD?
Platters will not be independant of each other w/o some very advanced engineering/electronics.
if those 2/3/4/5 heads could be independant, that would help a lot, agreed.
But they're not, so, oh well.

 

[RebateMonger]

As noted, data is written simultaneously onto all platters at once. The heads all move together. The drive's electronics turn all platters/heads into a single "virtual platter".

Photo of multiple platter/heads.

BBC: Hard disk drive

"The triangular-shaped head arm holds the read/write heads and is able to move the heads from the hub to the edge of the drive.

There is one hard arm per read/write head and all of them are lined up and mounted to the acuator as a single unit."