Does multi-platter hard-drive use all of their heads to read simultaneously?

Posted by WiSaGaN on Super User See other posts from Super User or by WiSaGaN
Published on 2012-06-15T02:49:38Z Indexed on 2012/06/17 21:19 UTC
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Suppose we have a harddisk with 2 platters with characteristics below:

Rotational rate: 10, 000 RPM
Avg sectors/track: 1000
Surfaces: 4
Sector size: 512 bytes

I was reading "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective 2ed" when I found that it calculates transfer time as if it only uses ONE head to read a sector.
If that's the case, why not use 4 heads to write(read) on 4 surfaces? So when I write a 2K bytes file, each head should only need to wait for the platters to rotate just one sector length instead of 4, thus reducing the transfer time by a factor of 4.
Or even redesign sector to make each sector on one cylinder but on 4 tracks residing same position respectively on 4 surfaces. Each one of (512/4) bytes. So when the hd needs to read a sector of 512 bytes, we only need the disk to rotate roughly 1/4 compare to original time.
The idea looks like RAID 0.

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