thicker drives might be the way to go?

[Axel]

Having tools and being curious, I often find myself taking apart junk to see what made it tick when it did work -

It follows that I have taken apart a few hard drives in my day -

Also - reading too many threads on hard drives, it occured to me that you could make a really fast drive with more space if you allowed it to fill two drive bays, decrease the diameter of the media while increasing the number or arms and disks in the drive from the typical 2 or 3 to 6 or 7 of a smaller diameter.

As the read-write arms have less distance to travel , the average access speed should be much better than a standard 3.5 hard drive.

One negative element to this idea is that you have more moving parts and "points of failure" to the drive. Another is that not all systems have two 3.5 or 5.25 bays that one could put a double height drive into.....

So - kick this one around a bit - what do you guys think?

Another design thought - put it into a 5.25 format and actually add a built in fan dedicated to cooling the drive from an outside air source, drawing into the bottom front of the drive and forcing out through the top front of the drive out of the case so you aren't pushing hot air into the inside of the case....

I'd say the target market would be for builders working with a full tower format.

[otheos]

Well the X15-36LP uses a 3in platter to take it's access times as low as possible (3.2ms) so it's something that's been thought off.

But if you add the high costs of the arms/bearings plus the added heat due to all this machinery, never mind the format of such a drive....

What would add a lot in perfornace could be stripping of the platters, and actually this was once done by WD but soon left behind due to one big problem: heat. Platters are behaving in a different way under heat and given the single arm motor, syncing with different thermal properties was a nightmare, however speed was really good.

So ideally you take a 3 platter 120GB drive, shave half an inch off the diameter, strip the platters (hell strip the first two mirror to the third for added security) and even with 7200rpm you got a very fast drive.

Too bad it's not gonna happen as thermal expansion will kill it after a few seeks. The costs of R&D for such a solution I am sure were considered and was dropped for good in 1997.

[Axel]

with all of the advances in flash ram, I'd hazard a guess that media drives will be a thing on the past in a few years anyway in favor of solid state drives. No moving parts - so you have far fewer failures..... now if the price will only come down..... and the number of suppliers increase -

In part we are already seeing this in the little USB keychain storage devices that are out there.....

[Axel]

now what would be really cool is a solid state drive kit that uses either smart media or flash ram to build a drive - make it scalable so you can add as much as you can afford over time.

set the kit to accept and integrate ram and make it an expandible RAID 5 array that accepts as much RAM as the adapter could hold....

[Hickman]

I think solid state drives are already in the works. I read something about it at the Seagate website.