4 ms·

I'd want to see an overall calculation. Twice as many actuators means twice as many things can go wrong. I think I prefer KISS. On the flip side, I guess each a

I'd want to see an overall calculation. Twice as many actuators means twice as many things can go wrong. I think I prefer KISS. On the flip side, I guess each actuator gets used half as often. I use HDD for bulk storage and SSD for high-speed storage. I don't mind less speed, except insofar as it impacts reliability (e.g. a drive in a RAID fails, and the redundant drive fails while rebuilding the array). It seems like competitors to HDD have become increasingly noncompetitive over time. Tape drives are insanely expensive at reasonable capacity. DVDs hold 0.1% of an HDD and are more expensive. Various newfangled optical drives (e.g. M DISC) appear more reliable than HDDs, but also cost much more per TB. Plus, you need to keep a big pile of coasters.

hinkley 6y ago
> I guess each actuator gets used half as often. I don't think that will be true. By having the heads only read half the platters, the bytes per track are <areal density increase>/2. That's more seek operations for linear reads and small offsets. For completely random access that's probably the same number of seek operations as before, but queuing latency is lower. Where it might reduce seeks is where multiple processes are trying to stream data at the same time, which sounds like is happening more and more.