Google Proposes New Hard Drive Format For Data Centers (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In a new research paper the VP of Infrastructure at Google argues for hard drive manufacturers and data center provisioners to consider revisions to the current 3.5" form-factor in favour of taller, multi-platter form factors — with the possibility of combining the new format with HDDs of smaller circumference which hold less data but have better seek times. Eric Brewer, also a professor at UC Berkeley, writes "The current 3.5" HDD geometry was adopted for historic reasons – its size inherited from the PC floppy disk. An alternative form factor should yield a better TCO overall. Changing the form factor is a long term process that requires a broad discussion, but we believe it should be considered."

Comments

Re:Multiple heads

[Andrew Lindh]

This has been done before.... Both outside/middle dual heads and dual independent actuators on each side. Multi heads can increase performance, but cost space, power, and money. Also more parts = lower MTBF. They don't increase storage density. If you want performance use SSD.

http://www.tomshardware.com/ne...

Re:Multiple heads

[nojayuk]

There were SCSI drives with four head actuators, one in each corner of the drive casing. They were treated as four separate drives logically and used to speed up reads on a "first to deliver the requested block" basis. They were horrendously expensive and it turned out to be very difficult to optimise the read process to gain the desired perfomance boost.