Why aren't multi-platter drives faster?

tynopik

Diamond Member
Aug 10, 2004
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It seems that if a single platter drive can have a STR over 100MB/s, then a three-platter drive should be able to have a STR of over 300MB/s, basically treating each platter as a drive in a RAID-0 array.

On the downside it would probably be louder and use more power, but surely there would still be an enthusiast/pro market for such a thing?
 

Mark R

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Oct 9, 1999
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The tracks are simply too fine to synchronise all the individual heads. Even if head A is driven to cylinder 1,234,567 there's no guarantee that head B will be at the same position.

The cylinders are very narrow on modern drives are spaced only a few nanometers apart - typically around 75 nm on a state-of-the-art drive. No matter how careful the design, the quality of the materials and the quality of the parts, you can't align a part to that precision and keep the alignment despite vibration, temperature changes, etc.

You can take the active head and have it follow the cylinder (even allowing for the cylinder wobbling because the platter isn't perfectly central on the spindle - there's no way you can mount a platter on the motor and keep the center aligned to 50 nm), by using an active tracking controller, which constantly senses the position of the head in relation to the track, and making microadjustments. Indeed, that's how modern hard drives work.

So, is it possible to have each head on it's own control arm. Yes, it is. It's been tried, but it is utterly impractical. The individual arms each need their own actuator and control processor. The arms create vibration which interfere with each other's motion, etc. There were a few commercial products that worked this way; they were fast, but ludicrously expensive, power hungry and unreliable.

Shortly afterwards, RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) was invented. Now you could combine individual disks to get effectively a higher performing, bigger disk. What's more these individual regular disks were much cheaper, than a "super-disk".

The multi-actuator drives died, never to be heard from again. RAID was subsequently rebranded "redundant array of independent disks", as the price was no relevant (or correct).
 

tynopik

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Aug 10, 2004
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didn't realize there was only a single actuator. So all the heads move in unison? interesting

i had heard about dual head drives being too complicated and error prone where they had two heads reading the same platter
 
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Charles Kozierok

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May 14, 2012
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Yes they move together. Being able to read/write from multiple heads would also require more processing hardware, and changes in temperature and air pressure (etc.) would cause cylinders to become misaligned over time.

There have been drives with multiple actuators, but they each controlled a full stack of read arms. In practice, RAID is just an easier way to get multiples of actuators and everything else. :)
 

tweakboy

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Jan 3, 2010
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www.hammiestudios.com
It seems that if a single platter drive can have a STR over 100MB/s, then a three-platter drive should be able to have a STR of over 300MB/s, basically treating each platter as a drive in a RAID-0 array.

On the downside it would probably be louder and use more power, but surely there would still be an enthusiast/pro market for such a thing?


With my single platter F4 320GB Ive gotten 154mbps on crystalmark. But usually when I run it I get 140ish mbps........ my WDC does 100mbps. gl
 

greenhawk

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Feb 23, 2011
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There was an attempt at bring dual read/write arms back a while back (decade now?) but the idea was that the second arm would be read only. It was intended as a hardware based read-only feature for data protection (ie: one system pluged in to the read only connector and another computer connected to the normal read/write connector for updating the data. Did not take off in the business market and no idea how it would have worked in a consumer one without special drivers (if wanting to connect at both ends).

but in the end I think the issue was with getting the second head to read the tracks placed by the first head. Easy in theory, hard in practice.