The article does mention that this is a complication particular to SMR drives, but I was thinking about this not necessarily as a means of reaching higher density storage, but more reliable and perhaps higher performance solutions that would fall somewhere between the compromises of an SSD and a mechanical drive.
It also seems possible that instead of a single super high density strip of heads which may be impossible to manufacture, that instead a series of much lower density array strips could be mounted in n ranks, each rank offset from the predecessor by n/(distance between heads in each strip).
I assume this is not an insurmountable engineering, but that someone has already had this idea or something similar to it, and after running the numbers found it doesn't deliver enough of an advantage over the conventional design to be worth exploring further.
It also seems possible that instead of a single super high density strip of heads which may be impossible to manufacture, that instead a series of much lower density array strips could be mounted in n ranks, each rank offset from the predecessor by n/(distance between heads in each strip).
I assume this is not an insurmountable engineering, but that someone has already had this idea or something similar to it, and after running the numbers found it doesn't deliver enough of an advantage over the conventional design to be worth exploring further.