Empirical analysis of a moving head disc model with two heads separated by a fixed number of tracks

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Abstract
This paper discusses an empirical study of a moving head disc system which has two heads on each calliper arm, separated by a fixed number of tracks. The behaviour of the system was examined by means of a simulation model operating with a uniform random request sequence. Two derivatives of the shortest seek time algorithm were investigated and for each the optimal head separation was found as a function of request queue length. It was found that when both heads are constrained to remain within the recording region, the optimal head separation approximates to half the distance between the innermost and outermost tracks. If either head is allowed to go outside the recording region, the optimal head separation was found to be a linearly reducing function of queue length. The former algorithm gives the best performance in minimising seek times.

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