
Seagate to Double HDD Speed with Multi-Actuator Technology - Osiris
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-multi-actuator-heads-seagate,36132.html
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Const-me
It’s gonna be a difficult task to develop a firmware for the drive to benefit
from this advanced hardware design.

In the current-generation spinning HDDs, the firmware has no idea about a file
system. It doesn’t even know which sectors are holding data and which ones are
empty. The firmware maintains a simple mapping between logical blocks and
physical sectors, just a linear mapping + small lookup table for relocated
sectors.

For performance reasons, you’d want to balance the data between two halves of
the drive, and maintain that balance.

Current-gen SSDs solve somewhat similar problem because they do wear leveling.
They do that with custom-designed chips. Just reusing the chip will ruin the
performance of this dual-head spinning HDD, because SSDs don’t account for
slow head movement latency, flash memory access speed is almost independent of
the physical location of the block being accessed.

Technically, it might be easier to solve the problem on the higher level of
the stack, i.e. in the file system implementation. But Seagate is not in a
position to offer a solution on that level, they sell hard drives, not
computers or operating systems.

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bleke
Maybe can somebody enlighten why didn't do two actuators on same plates, even
second only reading the hdd performance could be easily increased? Because
current solution looks like put two hard drives in single enclosure and
connected like raid0.

