I don't claim to know much about the technical details of hard disks, but it seems to me that the main bottleneck to hard drive performance is the sequential data read/write access strategy they employ. Here is my idea for future performance boost...

When using a 4 platter drive, why not use all 8 read/write heads in parallel to read/write data to the drive. The layout of data stored on the drive will no longer be in the same format as is currently used, but just think of the possibilities...

1. Hard drive performance boosted by factor of 8.

2. Fragmentation reduced by factor of 8.

3. Because data is stored as collections of 8 bits, then drive head movement is reduced by factor of 8.

4. Drive wear & tear greatly reduced.

5. As platter data density increases with each new generation, these advantages will also translate to improvements in this parallel read/write strategy.

6. For the first time, the data throughput of a drive designed using this technique will far outstrip current bus bandwidth speeds.

7. Much simpler to implement than real RAID as all 8 read/write heads are synchronised with each other (not independent as in RAID) and the data storage locations on the disc platters.

8. You can link up several of these drives in a standard RAID configuration for further performance boost.

What do you guys think?

Parallel R/W heads is not a new idea. I goes back to the earliest days of disk drives. I is impractical today because of the high track densities incorporated in modern disk drives, that make it impossible to maintain a predictable relationship between the read/write heads in the disk drive. The servo bursts on modern disk drives are written in-situ after the drive is mechanically assembled. The problem is that mechanical differences in geometry make it impossible to maintain the relationship with temperature and the slight forces imposed on the drive mechanism when it is mounted in a chassis is a disaster.

#1 the idea is great!!
The problem is the synchronization of the heads with the platters must be almost impossible to achieve.
Something like printer heads alignment to difficult to be perfectly aligned, imagine a hard drive!

At least I think it’s because of that. If it was possible, the performance boost would be enormous!!

Is keeping the drive heads synchronised really such a problem?

Surely, all that matters is that they remain sysnchronised relative to each other is all that matters, and an initial format will set up the sectors on the disc so that they are aligned to the heads. Of course, if the heads go out of relative alignment, then you will lose data and a reformat will be required. You could always add extra parity bits so minimise this risk.

Maybe someone will solve this issue eventually, as parallel read/write seems to offer significant benefits if it the technology can be mastered.

With write verify set to on and stuck that way, this family of products is not the world's fastest. It is, in fact the world's slowest hard drive. Multimedia users beware!! There's nothing like a 50% speed reduction on writes to ruin your video projects. I bought a 250 gigabyte model upon the advice of this review. I assumed that it was defective, so I bought another one. Both are the world's worst performers. Beware!! Avoid!!

Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 review is TRIPE!!! World's slowest hard drive is promoted as world's fastest hard drive. This is just incredible.