Any raid like this?

[TheBuzzer]

Is there a raid style where it uses just one drive , it stores the data into 2 or more parts. so when it stores data it stores it by like a good distance away from the same data, This way the drive could try to spin to the nearest place where the data is stored.

So like a 500 gb hd. say get divided into 5 parts so there is only 100 gb. Each of the 5 parts are all the same distance away from each other stored onto the hard drive. This way the hard drive when getting data, it can choose the closest place to move to get the information.

So is there any raid setup like this?

 

[unhappy_mage]

You could emulate something like that by doing a raid 1 of two halves of the drive. But this would hurt performance compared to just partitioning the disk in half and only using half. Whenever you wrote something to disk you'd have to write in two places, far apart, which guarantees a large seek with every write. That's bad.

 

[TheBuzzer]

so it makes writing slower but how about reading? does it make reading faster?

 

[unhappy_mage]

No. It could decrease latency slightly (but no more than if you had just partitioned half the disk and left the other half alone) but it wouldn't increase the STR of the disk.

 

[Zamboni]

Look up "hard drive interleaving" for something similar. This was used when the rotational speed was faster than the heads could read it. With modern drives, the problem is reversed -- the read heads can outrun the disks, so interleaving has been mostly abandoned. Interleaving with duplicate sectors would probably be slower than a defragemented non-interleaved drive.

For pure speed, get a smart defragmenter that puts the most-used files on the outer edge of the platter. The read speed there is far faster than on the inner sectors (so park seldom used files there).