4 Oct
2004
4 Oct
'04
10:33 p.m.
On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 15:27 -0500, Dan Wright wrote:
That brings me to another point, though -- if you had
2 seperate disks in the
same enclosure, with no environmental isolation between them, you'd likely
kill both disks with a head crash on either one.
Two stacks of 2.5" platters should fit in one 3.5" drive enclosure, and
give a slightly larger data surface as compared to a single 3.5" stack.
Platters will be thinner too so you can stack more of them; with two
head assemblies throughput should be improved; smaller diameter platters
mean less physical head movement and so faster seek times; lighter
platters mean less power for spindle motors and faster spin-up time;
3.5" enclosure means it fits into industry-standard enclosures...
I suspect reliability would be a key problem, coupled with heat
dissipation, and probably vibration problems from two drive motors. Not
to mention tooling/design costs...
:-)
A head crash in a modern high-speed drive tends to
throw a lot of
pulverized platter and head bits around inside the disk, damaging the
other platters that may not have been involved in the actual crash.
Modern head crashes are boring though. It's no good unless platters
physically explode :-) If only they could catch fire, too. There just
aren't enough modern-day computing war stories around...
So I think you'd need to isolate the sections
from each other with some kind of airtight (or at least
really-small-bits-of-metal tight) seal; probably doable, but would take up
more room that you're pretty low on already.
Don't modern drives embed servo information across platters though? So
as soon as you lose one platter the drive's dead anyway. A crash will
also likely introduce unacceptable drag into the head assembly, and
what's the point in having a drive running at less than 100%? To get
things back to an operational state you have to replace the whole lot
anyway.
I'm assuming you're kidding ;-)
cheers,
Jules