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stationary head-strip

 Hard-drive with one stationary head per track
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Given that heads are thin film technology, and that control electronics gets cheaper every year; at some point it will become cheaper to make a hard drive with no head movement servo at all; but one stationary head per track instead. WOuld increase read and write speeds too in proportion to th3e number of heads. Same idea works for cd-rom and dvd of course.
—philipsargent, Aug 15 2004

Fixed-head mainframe disk, circa 1975 http://www.gizmodo....hnically-018574.php
"Each track therefore had its own head, so the seek time was zero - you just electronically switched heads." [krelnik, Oct 17 2004]

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       Damn! I was hoping stationary had been misspelled and this was about a paper headband.
—Zanzibar, Aug 15 2004
   

       Actually, this is the way disk drives were made originally, back in the days when the disk platters were half a meter across and the drive cost $100,000. See link for a picture.
—krelnik, Aug 15 2004
   

       I think track spacing is too tight. The other problem would be data rate - a single head can read up to 100MB/s with 15K Atlas drives. That would be approximate 50GB/s (given that there are about 1000 tracks on a 3.5" platter).   

       Far bigger savings would be in seak times, which would be reduced to rotational latency. Unfortunately, I think high capacity flash drives will reign supreme as there's no latency at all.
—nonarKitten, Jun 08 2006
   

       I imagine the heads distributed over the surface in a Fibbonaci spiral like the seeds in a sunflower.   

       Read and write speeds would not increase in _direct_ proportion to the number of heads; there are overheads in parallel data processing and transmission meaning the speed increase is less than you might expect.
—spidermother, Jun 08 2006
   


 

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