Question: Why no internal raid 0 single HD’s?

[Drutort]

This is a question I had for a while, I think theoretically its possible, today the platters are able to hold more and more Gb’s this makes for an interesting idea of internal raid 0 possibilities… that is having multi platters acting in a raid 0 configuration with independent controller/heads but shared motor.

SSD is great, but HD’s are still here to rule for very long time.

I would like to hear some opinions if such a technology is possible or not possible. In theory you will still have only 1 HD failing but the benefits of multi HD’s at the sacrifice of storage over speed, you would end up pay nearly 2x for the HD for the performance benefits, I think that is reasonable for the improved performance and safety factor.

Raid 1 doesn’t make much since but could be done as well, though since your sharing a lot of components on the HD is not really a raid 1, any component that fails will cause both your mirror to fail. Only advantage is in reading? Maybe? I’m curious how this would change when you have single motor spinning but ability to have multiple heads in parallel moving, I would bet it’s a lot faster read then traditional HD’s

This type of technology would be huge for laptop and other hand held small form factor HD’s not only that but you get power savings as well.

[Hamfiles]

There have been many reviews for PC using 2 or more IDE drives in RAID 0. Aside from more overhead for the CPU to deal with, there just is not that much of a performance increase.

You would not really be sacrificing any storage, using stiping RAID, but if one part of the drive was currupt, it would be difficult to recover any data, even using NTFS file system.

If the HD maker developed software to recover data from cluster failure, and if they could make a monster drive with 4 "separate" drives in one, using RAID 0, then I might consider it. I used to run 2 hard drives in RAID 0, and my system was noticibly faster than with same drives not RAIDed together, but it was only slightly faster, nothing earth-shattering.

Also, the hard drive maker would have to include the RAID controller chip on the drive, along with the needed circuitry, which would prob. drive up the cost significantly.