I've noted in the past people tend to like drives with single platters for improved access times (I think?), and perhaps relatively good areal density - presumably compared to a same capacity hard disk with more platters. Over the weekend, while waiting for some file transfers between drives to complete, watching speeds wander up and down, I got to thinking about how data must be laid out on hard disks.
Say you have a hard disk with two platters - how is the data laid out between the platters, and how is it decided? Does Windows tell the drive exactly which sectors to put the data in, or does the hard disk manage that? And does Windows know anything about how many platters the disk has?
An idea came to mind on how to make hard drives perform much faster - an idea which may be how they work already, but since I don't have a clue I thought I'd put it out there. Inside a multi-platter drive you have all the heads on one actuator arm, hence they're all in the same position across each platter. The question is, why not have the drive firmware stripe the data across platters, using all the read/write heads simultaneously, in a similar fashion to RAID-0 across multiple drives. You would need the drive electronics to be able to cope with read/write with all the heads at once, but it would lift some of the physical limitations.
Maybe this is done already, but if it were, throughput would increase linearly with the number of platters in a hard drive, and everyone would want as many platters in their drive as possible - which doesn't seem to be the case?
Say you have a hard disk with two platters - how is the data laid out between the platters, and how is it decided? Does Windows tell the drive exactly which sectors to put the data in, or does the hard disk manage that? And does Windows know anything about how many platters the disk has?
An idea came to mind on how to make hard drives perform much faster - an idea which may be how they work already, but since I don't have a clue I thought I'd put it out there. Inside a multi-platter drive you have all the heads on one actuator arm, hence they're all in the same position across each platter. The question is, why not have the drive firmware stripe the data across platters, using all the read/write heads simultaneously, in a similar fashion to RAID-0 across multiple drives. You would need the drive electronics to be able to cope with read/write with all the heads at once, but it would lift some of the physical limitations.
Maybe this is done already, but if it were, throughput would increase linearly with the number of platters in a hard drive, and everyone would want as many platters in their drive as possible - which doesn't seem to be the case?