Hitachi and Partners Develop New HDD Technology Providing 8-Fold Density Increase

[Mussels]

They need to develop something better than a read / write heads that moves around. Maybe a head strip across the platter.

look into HRD's, we've already been discussing them in this thread.

 

[Steevo]

The heads and other electronics are the cost of the drives, adding more heads increases the complexity of the PCB, it also means you have to find a way to support the heads that ride between platters, their wiring, and shimming them to the correct tolerance with uneven platters, bearing travel, and wear.

Really the floating head design was revolutionary, it has little resistance, fast access time, and is self adjusting, and reliable, plus being cheap. The raptor and server class harddrives show the slowness of a consumer grade hard drive is caused by lower RPM, and the higher access times are half the lower RPM and half the physical size of the platter for sweep time.


What we need is more aerial density, higher RPM, and more platters at smaller diameter. larger discs at higher RPM means more vibration, so smaller discs will allow for the higher RPM, and the higher density will allow for the same or increased storage, more platters means a higher number of bits flying under the heads per second.


Plus the ability to ramp RPM and use a small cheap vibration detecting and tuning device to minimize vibration at maximum RPM would allow for a drive to idle down to slower speeds during low or no demand and then ramp up during high demand.