leaking pen wrote:
wouldnt work. the modern disks heat up mostly due to the head/platterConventional (floating head) fixed-head disks did, indeed, completely cover the disk with heads; they didn't just have one row of heads. That, by itself, should require nothing new. Such disks were manufactured by a number of companies at one time, not just DG.
interaction. if you COULD make heads that small (unlikely) the
friction would melt the platter down. a multihead idea thats not
quite that ambitious might be useful though.
The problem, of course, was that even with the disk surface totally plastered with heads, the fact that each head has many times the (physical) surface area of the actual read/write gap made it impossible for fixed-head track density to approach the track density of a moving-head disk. And, of course, the cost of the fixed-head disk tended to higher IIRC -- thousands of heads cost more than a single arm and stepper motor. ("Microscopic" heads would require microscopic read/write gaps, and if you could do that for fixed heads you could do the same with moving heads, and one might speculate that fixed heads would again fall far behind in the density race.)
I've occasionally wondered why fixed-head disks fell by the wayside, along with magnetic drums. I suppose density and cost considerations were too much for both of those approaches; the moving head disk, with its unavoidable variable read/write speed and seek delays, is just too cheap and too dense by comparison. I have a fuzzy memory of an old fixed-head disk from Dec that could store 4K bytes (can that possibly be correct?). Even at that time it was pretty tiny compared to the moving-head washing machine drives.
