blakerwry said:
not sure I necesarily agree with you. I think prodicing disks with less platters is more fo a cost savings measure than anything else. I don't see why we couldn't stick with atleast 3 platter drives one the processes mature(ex: 60 is mature now, 80 will be soon).
Going away from multiplatter platforms was partly for cost reasons and partly because of the inherent difficulty of designing for multiple configurations.
For the past few generations, one of the easiest ways of taking cost out of a drive was to remove disks and heads. With areal density increasing at close to 100% a year, it was much easier to do this than to spend time/energy designing cheaper ways of making the same parts. This is especially true when heads/media probably are the most expensive components in the drive.
Of course, one of the costs of reducing disks and heads is that media and head manufacturers started either folding or merging.
Often, to make a multiplatter drive work takes several special "tricks," what are commonly called "enablers." Maybe you have to be more sensitive to windage effects, or shock performance, or acoustics when you have more disks. These usually cost more money, either in the R&D or the component production cost, or both.
Couple the higher development costs with smaller volumes for the "large" drives, it isn't cost-effective to do so unless the profit margins are sufficient to offset the costs. There has been much debate within the industry of whether 2 or 3 disk platforms will be the long-term direction, with most firms going back and forth between the two.
As for perpendicular recording, it's been "a few years" out for the past several years. It'll probably happen someday, but predicting anything more than a year out is difficult, at best.
