On: MACH.2 Multi-Actuator Hard Drives

[linsomniac]

I could have sworn that back in the '90s I heard about some enterprise drives that had multiple sets of actuators to give multiple heads per platter. However, in searching around I'm not finding any references to any. Maybe I was just daydreaming about "that would be cool", but in reality it just made more sense to throw more drives at the problem and get more parallelism through additional drives. Maybe the platters weren't the bulk of the cost, perhaps even the actuators and head assemblies were the bulk of the cost, making it totally not make sense (IOW, the drive wouldn't be marginally more expensive, it would be twice or more as expensive).

Looks like WD has multi-actuator drives as well: https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/news/365530452/West...

[wtallis → linsomniac]

> multiple heads per platter

Conner Peripherals "Chinook": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Conner_Peripherals_"Chino...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_Peripherals

It was apparently less of an innovation and more of a desperate measure to offset numerous other technological shortcomings.

[linsomniac → wtallis]

That sounds vaguely familar, thanks for that pointer.