leaking pen will not spare us petty details:
wouldnt work. the modern disks heat up mostly due to the head/platter interaction.
Ah, then we must go even more retro, and lift the array of read write heads so far above the platter, you can see a crack of light between them. By the way, this "array" would be another disk, the same size as the platter. I suppose it would make more sense to spin the platter, but it might be more fun to try to spin both of them, in opposite directions. Kind of hard to imagine how you interface . . .
Anyway, let's jack up the number to 16,000, because the separation greatly reduces the amount of data that can be written per track.
if you COULD make heads that small (unlikely) the . . .
I have not seen a read write head for a while, but they looked pretty small to me. One article described the modern read-write head as being "almost too small to be seen." Surely we could fit 16,000 in the space of a modern platter? What the point of all this research into nanotech if we cannot even do that? The idea would be to fabricate thousands integrated together on one disk, with some sort of lithographic technique. The component size would still be gigantic compared to an IC.
. . . friction would melt the platter down.
Details, details! Learn a lesson from Microsoft. You can finesse this by calling it a feature: Rapid Secure Thermal Data Erasing. A scene at the Microsoft Cafe:
"Waiter! There's a fly in my soup."
"Please sir, keep your voice down: everyone will be wanting one."
- Jed
