Way to Revolutionize the Hard Drive?

[vskid]

I have an idea, but first I need to confirm how hard drives work.
Lets say we have File A. We obtain it (through download, CD, doesn't matter), and the HD puts it all together on one side of one platter, right?
If so, I have a very good idea that will make hard drives a ton faster.

EDIT: Changed the title from "How Hard Drives Work?".

[Jimmy]

Lets say we have File A. We obtain it (through download, CD, doesn't matter), and the HD puts it all together on one side of one platter, right?

What the hell are you talking about? "The HD puts it all together on one side of the platter"? The Hard Drive encases the Hard Disc, which would be like a super rewritable cd. The HD isn't the only part of the computer that does all the work. There's a lot of other very important parts the contribute to speed.

[vskid]

Lets say we have File A. We obtain it (through download, CD, doesn't matter), and the HD puts it all together on one side of one platter, right?

What the hell are you talking about? "The HD puts it all together on one side of the platter"? The Hard Drive encases the Hard Disc, which would be like a super rewritable cd. The HD isn't the only part of the computer that does all the work. There's a lot of other very important parts the contribute to speed.

My idea takes that into account, I was just wondering if files are, in an ideal situation, all put together on one side of one platter on the hard disc. I know how they work, I was just making sure of it because Wikipedia didn't say.

[bicostp]

It puts the file wherever it can fit, or it fills up from the beginning, or it breaks the file up int chunks and distrubutes it around the drive. It all depends on your operating system and file system. (FAT, NTFS, HFS+, ext2...)

[vskid]

So could you, in theory, have the drive act as if each side of each platter is a separate drive and combine them in RAID 0 (stripped) and have it place all the files directly above and below each other on the platters, utilizing all the read/write heads at once to access different parts of the same file that is stripped over all the platters? (it makes sense in my head, might be able to explain better with a picture if needed)
Then you could access stuff 8x as fast in a drive with 4 platters, with it spinning at the same speed and with the same capacity.

[bicostp]

I don't think you can do that. (Can't break the drive into two drives. Two partitions or volumes, maybe, but not two drives.)

[atari2600a]

Actually, this technology has been put onto the market already, although I didn't look into it to remember what it was called. All I remember was that it was multiple hard disks, all acting as one as to store different portions of a file on the multiple hard disks as to access it faster. I doubt this could be done w/ something like an IDE hard disk, as the bus interface is too slow. (heck, I can't even play DDR on MAME w/o a SATA hard disk!)

[timmeh87]

atari, its called RAID, its been around for 30 years, and vskid mentioned it above. you can use it on IDE drives, sure. i think you have some big misconceptions on how fast SATA is compared to ATA-133

(answer: speed is still more or less limited by other parts of the comptuer, SATA is only 'theoretically' 27mb/s faster than ATA-133 anyways, and both kinds of drives only preform in the real world at about 40mb/s. although i agree with most people in saying that SATA is "better" in some ways, saying you wont play MAME without SATA makes you sound kind of ignorant)

---

vskid, what you describe does sound a lot like RAID 2

A RAID 2 stripes data at the bit (rather than block) level, and uses a Hamming code for error correction. The disks are synchronized by the controller to spin in perfect tandem. This is the only original level of RAID that is not currently used. Extremely high data transfer rates are possible.

The use of the Hamming(7,4) code (four data bits plus three parity bits) also permits using 7 disks in RAID 2, with 4 being used for data storage and 3 being used for error correction.


the thing is, to store a 32-bit word would require 37 platter sides (that is, 19 platters). even storing an 8-bit word would require 12 platter sides (6 platters). I think the problem is basically that you cant fit more than 4 or 5 platters in a normal 3.5" disk

[gannon]

both kinds of drives only preform in the real world at about 40mb/s.

And that being read, write, or both? Because I read at ~100mb/s and write at ~56mb/s to my IDE drives in my fileserver.

[atari2600a]

No, I'm saying that DDR won't even run at full speed on any machine using an ATA drive I've run it on, & I'm someone who compiles optimized mame beta releases!

...although, the only SATA computer I've tried to run Mame on probably has the fastest processor in the house...

Either way, I've never looked into modern data busses to really say much anyways...(6502 ASM FTW!!!)

[vskid]

So does that RAID 2 have it so that the heads can read/write parts of the same file on their respective platter, with all of them doing this at the same time? (except the error correction platters)

And I wasn't talking about taking the hard drive out of my computer and modding it to do this (and likely kill it in the process), I was thinking companies could make hard drives that do this. Then, instead on one head read/writing to one side of one platter at a time, all of the heads would be read/writing at the same time.

[vskid]

Bump.
Anyone have any comments or ideas on this?

[atari2600a]

If anyone cares, I actually got DDR running at full speed on my laptop (which uses an ATA bus) yesterday. Turns out the file was just fragmented, & a disk defrag brought my speed up about 7-10 frames. After that, I just had to do some slight tweaking to my mame.ini file to get some more juice out of my CPU. (turn on High Priority, turn off Sleep on throttle, turn on rtdsc) It still does skip once every minute or so, but I'm hoping to get an optimized build...um...built today, but for some reason GCC has been acting up on my laptop so I'm not holding my breath.

[timmeh87]

both kinds of drives only preform in the real world at about 40mb/s.

And that being read, write, or both? Because I read at ~100mb/s and write at ~56mb/s to my IDE drives in my fileserver.

read and write for the SATA RAID-0 in one of my computers. only ones i've actually ran tests on. . i guess i shouldn't have generalized so much but my point still is that drives still haven't hit 133mb/s anyways. although that 100 is pretty impressive. what kind of drive is it?


vskid, raid 2 uses multiple hard discs, every time you want to fetch a word it will fetch one bit from each hard drive. to speed things up, there is a main controller that makes sure that they spin together so that matching bits all pass under the heads at the same time. it uses hamming error detection, so the error detection is mixed in with the data. it reads it all at once and then the controller checks to make sure there was no error.

[vskid]

vskid, raid 2 uses multiple hard discs, every time you want to fetch a word it will fetch one bit from each hard drive. to speed things up, there is a main controller that makes sure that they spin together so that matching bits all pass under the heads at the same time. it uses hamming error detection, so the error detection is mixed in with the data. it reads it all at once and then the controller checks to make sure there was no error.

So something like my idea already exists, just with multiple drives instead of one?