Halting Hard Disk

Many hard-disk drives have a feature where the operating system can tell the drive to turn off its spindle motor to save power, prevent wear, or reduce noise when the drive is not being used (when the machine is idle.) However, there are many situations where it is desirable to shut down the drive in this manner, but one is running a program that still needs some non-volatile storage space. For example, if you are running a word-processor for many hours on end, there is no need for the ability to access the entire drive - only that portion of the platter where your file is stored. THUS, I propose a hard-disk where "linear storage zones" exist. Normally, a file (if not fragmented) will be written in a shape resembling an arc - the platter will rotate as the write head will stay in a fixed position for a brief moment. However, the proposed drive would have the ability to move its read/write head even when the spindle motor is not running. When the drive enters the "low power" mode and shuts off the rotor, it would first turn the spindle to a known "linear storage" position. Here, as the name implies, files would be stored as patterns oriented along the radius of the platters. Thus, the drive would have a special zone in which reading and writing could be done only when the drive is not spinning. The zone could possibly include several hundred MB of data. Thus, there would be no need to keep the drive spinning when running a word-processor, as there would be a small amount of nonvolatile storage space that you could save your work on even when the drive spindle is not turning. The technology could be used to save significant amounts of power on portable computers, as most users rarely run software that requires rapid access to more than several hundred MB of storage at one time.