I don't know about seek times, but one of the major problems with almost all storage systems is that the time to _process every byte_ continues to go up, because storage density is going up faster than transfer rates. Multiply the fastest transfer rate of your disk drive by its capacity. You'll be astounded at how long it can take to read the whole thing. If you have a large (64GByte) flash drive, calculate how long it will take to _write_ the whole thing. These times are lengthened by another order of magnitude if the data consists of small files (e.g., Unix/Linux). (Actual transfer times are usually considerably slower than advertised, due to the inability of OS's like Windows to do proper write caching for flash drives.) At 05:30 PM 7/17/2013, Bill Gosper wrote:
This reminds me of my dumb idea to reduce disk seek times with multiple heads per surface. Surface is cheap.