On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Scott Kaufman <bskauf...@gmail.com> wrote: > So while it can interleave data across multiple > platters, all the heads would still be at the same > location on the platters.
In a sequential read or write operation, by interleaving data across the platters (actually, sides of platters), you should be able to increase throughput. If you don't interleave this way, then you read all sectors along a single track, then seek to the next track. Once you've covered all tracks on a side, you move to the next side (head). With this interleaving, you read all sectors on all sides at once. Then you read the next set of sectors, all at once. When you reach the end of the track, you seek to the next track, but keep reading all heads at once. You essentially multiply sequential throughput by the number of sides. Same for writing. If you're doing random I/O instead, you don't get any benefit from this, but it doesn't hurt anything, either. You already have to seek -- move the arm and wait for the sector to rotate around -- anyway. Just only activate the head you need. This would require the controller have logic to drive and buffer multiple heads at once (without this kind of interleaving, you could switch a single set of logic across all heads), but beyond that, it should be trivial. As I said, it's entirely possible, even likely, they do this already. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
