Theoretical - Raid in one drive.

[piemadd]

Hey there Implosivetech,

 

Creating a RAID array on a single drive is quite impractical for a few main reasons:

 - In order for any RAID to actually give you benefit, it should either give you redundancy or speed. Having a RAID array on a single drive can't possibly give you any of those. There can't be redundancy of the data as if the drive fails, you would lose everything on it, not only part of the data. Speed gain is also something that can't be done since the data needs to be written at least on two places at once and this is impossible as the drive has only one actuator with a read/write head per platter.

 - Creating a drive with multiple read/write heads is impractical as you need the mechanics for more moving parts, more actuators hence more space, heat and noise output and power consumption which would both increase the cost the drive beyond reasonable values and add way too much complexity to the drive which on its own would lead to much higher failure rates and risk for the data.

 - No matter what you do the read/write head on each platter can function at one place at a time. To have an actual speed increase you would need a second one (like in Striped arrays) to perform the same as the first one. 

 

Feel free to ask if you happen to have questions

 

Captain_WD.

Maybe hacking the firmware to speed up the head speed could to the trick. It will increase the risk of something shattering, but it will do the trick.

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Increase the speed of the head how?

[piemadd]

Increase the speed of the head how?

Hacking the firmware. If we can.

[Godlygamer23]

Hacking the firmware. If we can.

The drive is set to its maximum guaranteed performance. Increasing the speed of the head will take it out of specification and possibly ruin the entire drive.

[piemadd]

The drive is set to its maximum guaranteed performance. Increasing the speed of the head will take it out of specification and possibly ruin the entire drive.

Isn't that what Linus does. All of the time.

[piemadd]

Isn't that what Linus does. All of the time.

[Godlygamer23]

Isn't that what Linus does. All of the time.

Can you reference what you're referring to?

[piemadd]

Can you reference what you're referring to?

Linus breaks a ton of stuff while doing projects. It's how he works.

[Godlygamer23]

Linus breaks a ton of stuff while doing projects. It's how he works.

He's not increasing the speed of a hard drive head.

[piemadd]

He's not increasing the speed of a hard drive head.

I was referencing that Linus messes everything up.

[chicksoup]

are you for real? If there was a magic way to make hard drives faster we would be using it right now. Linus only made videos of RAID servers as the data load can be written in segments to different drives faster than all to one drive

[Jarsky]

I don't know why you keep referencing Linus as if hes some Demi-God nutjob hacker? Most of the 'out there' stuff he does, are already things that have been already community-driven concepts, or adaptations on things people have already done, that have a reasonable chance of success, or really have an unknown outcome.

 

What you're suggesting is currently not possible. It's not that we "don't know", it flat out is not possible to increase performance/reliability by RAID'ing partitions on a single physical disk.

Yes, there are higher bandwidth connections (SAS) than SATA, but the SATA interface isn't the limiting factor.

Yes, there are multi-head setups for multi platters - but theyre single actuator, not independantly controlled - this is what a raid controller does with multiple disks.

Creating an internally raided drive with independantly controlled spindals using current designs of how mechanical drives work, adds a huge amount of complexity and make independant disks extremely expensive. Given that hardware advances starts in the enterprise world (where the real money is), and there would be no requirement for this in the enterprise space, such technology would not make it to the consumer world.

 

Bare in mind, you can still RAID VHD's which can be on the same physical disk, but as per my above statement it would yield no benefit. You would only do that more as a proof-of-concept/learning thing. Even RAID'ing VHD's in a real environment, you would run multiple physical disks.

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

I was asking at what particular way can the head's speed be increased. Are you referring to the speed it moves above the platter? Or the speed that the data travels between the head and the platter? Or something else? 

 

Captain_WD.