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US 7,760,463 B2Granted
Multiple disks in a single disk package
AssigneeTeradata US, Inc.
InventorsWilliam Ward, P. Keith Muller
Life of this patent
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AssigneeTeradata US, Inc.
InventorsWilliam Ward, P. Keith Muller
Estimating the term…
A disk drive having a single drive motor and multiple platters that incorporates two discrete data paths, actuators and heads to the disk platters. Utilizing the economy of very large capacity disk platters, two or more disk drives can be created within a single physical enclosure. These two disks will be share many common parts such as the drive enclosure and spindle motor, but will have the performance and appearance to the system as two or more independent disks. Instead of having one actuator arm, the virtual disks will have two or more actuator arms and two or more sets of digital electronics. The storage on all the platters is divided up among the actuators so that no storage location is shared, but all the actuators will operate concurrently. Each actuator will have exclusive use of a subset of the data storage. Disks normally only have one actuator connected to multiple heads, at least one per surface, which only allow a single data seek and data transfer at a time. The virtual disks will have two or more actuators, one for each virtual disk, improving performance for the capacity of the platters through concurrent data seeks and transfers to different data areas.
A storage disk system, comprising:
A method of performing a read/write operation on a storage disk having a plurality of disk platters and two or more actuator assemblies, the disk platters each having an upper surface and a lower surface, the actuator assemblies each having two or more actuator arms, the actuator arms each having one or more read/write heads, the method comprising:
A method of performing a read/write operation on a storage disk having a plurality of disk platters and two or more actuator arms each having one or more read/write heads, the disk platters each having an upper surface and a lower surface, the method comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.