| 摘要 |
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.
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