HDD capacity / read rates - reply

I wrote to IBM as follows
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Dear IBM people,
I have a question for
you.

Is HDD capacity related to read rate ?
I have read nothing to that effect in
any of the reviews I have read (which
always place IBM as the best quality
IDE HDDs which is why I only buy IBM
IDE HDDs).

I ask because I am aware that larger
gapacity HDDs like the 60Gb 60GXP have
multiple platters and I always presumed
multiple r/w heads.

It would make sense therefore to use
the heads concurrently in a similar way
to the RAID method to increase the
overall throughput of data by splitting
files over the platters and using them
as an array.

So if you were doing that a 60gb disc
with 3 platters should be able to
produce 3x the data bandwidth of a
20Gb - shouldnt it ?

So why doesnt it ?

Yours Richard L Ensor etc
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they replied


------------------------------------------

Dear Sir

Thank you for your mail

I am currently looking at your case and would like to inform you that Hard
drive capacity is not related to Read Rate. In answering your second
question there is a read/write head per platter each side totaling to 6 but
the drive can only read one sector at a time so it is not possible to read
from multiple heads.

If you have any other questions, please do no hesitate to contact me.

Regards.
--------------------------------------------


So that means if they developed parallel data access for the 6 heads they could sextuple the bandwidth - SEXTUPLE !!! Its obvious isnt it ? I hope they are currently trying to patent the idea and screw me out of millions of dollars, its the least I deserve for trying to be so helpful.

remember you saw it here first.......