Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
Now, More Pleasing Odor!

idea: add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

meta: news, help, about, links, report a problem

account: browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

user:
pass:
register,


           

stationary head-strip

 Hard-drive with one stationary head per track
  (+1)
(+1) 		  [vote for,
against]

Given that heads are thin film technology, and that control electronics gets cheaper every year; at some point it will become cheaper to make a hard drive with no head movement servo at all; but one stationary head per track instead. WOuld increase read and write speeds too in proportion to th3e number of heads. Same idea works for cd-rom and dvd of course.
—philipsargent, Aug 15 2004

Fixed-head mainframe disk, circa 1975 http://www.gizmodo....hnically-018574.php
"Each track therefore had its own head, so the seek time was zero - you just electronically switched heads." [krelnik, Oct 17 2004]

Please log in.
If you're not logged in, you can see what this page looks like, but you will not be able to add anything.
Short name, e.g., Bob's Coffee
Destination URL. E.g., https://www.coffee.com/
Description (displayed with the short name and URL.)






       Damn! I was hoping stationary had been misspelled and this was about a paper headband.
—Zanzibar, Aug 15 2004
   

       Actually, this is the way disk drives were made originally, back in the days when the disk platters were half a meter across and the drive cost $100,000. See link for a picture.
—krelnik, Aug 15 2004
   

       I think track spacing is too tight. The other problem would be data rate - a single head can read up to 100MB/s with 15K Atlas drives. That would be approximate 50GB/s (given that there are about 1000 tracks on a 3.5" platter).   

       Far bigger savings would be in seak times, which would be reduced to rotational latency. Unfortunately, I think high capacity flash drives will reign supreme as there's no latency at all.
—nonarKitten, Jun 08 2006
   

       I imagine the heads distributed over the surface in a Fibbonaci spiral like the seeds in a sunflower.   

       Read and write speeds would not increase in _direct_ proportion to the number of heads; there are overheads in parallel data processing and transmission meaning the speed increase is less than you might expect.
—spidermother, Jun 08 2006
   


 

back: main index
business  computer  culture  fashion  food  halfbakery  home  other  product  public  science  sport  vehicle