In terms of such technologies . . . I’m just an ignorant layman silly rabbit shrink . . .
But I’ve long wondered . . . .
Why wouldn’t it be possible . . . to construct read/write heads that were . . . say on 4 or more arms and slightly changed in alignment to deal with the spiral data or change the spiral data to nonspiral . . . Seems like such could be faster and remove the issue of crashing flying heads if the read/write were embedded in a solid disc slightly above the data disc.
or
even have solid state read/write sensors above the data disc that populated bit points equal to the bit points of the data disc . . . or maybe a read disc below and write disc above??
I’m sure there must be vast technical reasons such is undoable but I’ve long been curious so thought I’d ask this talented group.
But now we have flash drives advancing . . . and holographic crystal storage looming . . . ?? Right?
I know very little,..but you know that the heads actually fly over the surface...which means ....to me...that aerodynamic design issues are involved...
Hitachi halves hard drive head size
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By Tony Smith [More by this author]
Hitachi has developed a hard drive read/write head that's half the size of the units found in today's top-of-the-line HDDs - a crucial step, it claimed, to delivering a 4TB desktop drive, albeit not until 2009 at the earliest.
Hitachi's new head may be tiny - 30-50nm in size, one two-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair - but the technology it's based on is something of a mouthful: Current Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magneto-Resistive (CPP-GMR).
> Why wouldnt it be possible . . . to construct read/write
> heads that were . . . say on 4 or more arms ...
When I asked that question of some R&D guys back in the
80s, the answer was that the unpredictable inertial
interaction (vibration) between the heads and the
platters made it impossible to compensate for.
Multiple heads on the same arm has been considered too,
and is apparently too heavy, for starters.
Head-per-track, of course, is what drum drives were.
No one misses them.