ABSTRACT
Figure 7.1 shows that, in a disk drive, the data are recorded on a circular track. In hard-disk drives, the disk rotates at several thousand rev/min so that the headto-disk speed is of the order of 100 miles per hour. At this speed no contact can be tolerated, and the head flies on a boundary layer of air turning with the disk at a height measured in microinches. The longest time it is necessary to wait to access a given data block is a few milliseconds. To increase the storage capacity of the drive without a proportional increase in cost, many concentric tracks are recorded on the disk surface, and the head is mounted on a positioner which can rapidly bring the head to any desired track. Such a machine is termed a movinghead disk drive. An increase in capacity could be obtained by assembling many disks on a common spindle to make a disk pack. The small size of magnetic heads allows the disks to be placed close together. If the positioner is designed so that it can remove the heads away from the disk completely, it can be exchanged. The exchangeable-pack moving-head disk drive became the standard for mainframe and minicomputers for a long time.
