But if the number of platters, rotation speed and bit-density is exactly the same as in regular drives, the number of “bits” moving past the read/write heads per rotation would still stay the same? Would be interesting to know how much time typically is spent on actually reading the bits vs the tiny seeks & track calibration when reading, say, 10 GB sequentially.
Edit: other comments below explain the missing part, in a regular drive, apparently just one head can read/write (to one platter) at a time due to calibration reasons, even if your disk physically has 8 platters. So having two actuators allows two platters out of 8 to do IO concurrently.
Edit: other comments below explain the missing part, in a regular drive, apparently just one head can read/write (to one platter) at a time due to calibration reasons, even if your disk physically has 8 platters. So having two actuators allows two platters out of 8 to do IO concurrently.