Yeah, I was quite surprised to see "the drive presents itself as two disks"... I can only imagine building the drive this was was seen as the lowest risk in ter

Yeah, I was quite surprised to see "the drive presents itself as two disks"... I can only imagine building the drive this was was seen as the lowest risk in terms of both firmware NREs and additional hardware required. That being said, dual head stacks (as opposed to just dual actuators on a single head stack) would almost certainly not fit within the footprint that ordinary drives do, which would mean not being able to use standard disk enclosures for them... which would be a non-starter. Alternatively you shrink the platters, which means less capacity - and given that hard disk drives have been stuck at a certain areal density limit for a while I imagine nobody's particularly keen on losing lots of capacity for a small IOPS benefit. IDK - maybe if HAMR goes mainstream in hard drives then we can make that tradeoff without the drive seeming like an inferior product.