partition harddrive by platter/arm?

[ucjffj]

is it possible to partition your harddrive by making division according to platters or arms? so if your hard drive had 25gb platters, you could choose how many platters to put into 1 partition?

wouldn't such partitions save wear and tear on the hard drive?

 

[AluminumStudios]

I've never seen nor heard of such a thing. The hard drive's electronics provide an addressing scheme that is linear as far as the computer is concerned, the computer is not aware of the specific locations of data on the drive physically. Heads and sectors and such get translated by the electronics in the drive as well futher removing the PC from having any associatoin or knowledge of the drives true physical internals.

Most people would say wear and tear is irrelovent. After you use a hard drive enough to wear it out, time will have moved on and you'll be ready to buy a larger, faster, newer one ...

What you are asking about sounds like something that might have been possible in the days of the very first hard drives ... but by modern standards and practices it's probably not possible or useful.

 

[Teuton]

Never heard of such a thing. Never seen the option to do so.

 

[Lurien]

Maybe the mods would like to move this over to the HT forum? It seems like a more indepth topic.

 

[Pariah]

No, it isn't possible because the hard drive writes data down through the platters, not straight across one and then on to the next. Actually, modern hard drives often use a "zipper" like pattern where it will write inward for a given amount within the same cluster density zone, then go down to the next write surface and write from that spot outwards for the same distance, then down and in, and so forth. This minimizes the head switching required when just going straight down and writing inward then outward minimizes the required head movements as opposed to writing inwards going back to the outside and writing inwards again which would also cause highly undesirable breaks in sustained transfers. By limiting the each "zipper" to within the same cluster density zone, optimal placement of data on the platters is still assured.

It also needs to be pointed out, that the read/write head assembly is one piece, no matter what platter is being read, the heads for all the other surfaces are performing the same movements. So by forcing the drive to move further across one platter than a shorter distances when the data is spread over multiple platters would increase wear and tear, not decrease it.

Basically, the method that current hard drives use to write data already minimizes head movements and thus wear and tear as much as possible while still squeezing the best possible performance out of the drive.