In article .com,
says...
I remember back in the day of the $500 10 MB hard drive in a PC that
the data was interleaved on the platter and that you could increase the
transfer speed (and apparent computer performance) by finding the
optmium interleaving for your system.

Hell, we used to do that on Commodore floppies - except that there, the
serial interface was the bottleneck, so that you had to interleave based
on how long it took to transmit the sector to the computer. (Cue "I
once created a database entirely from ones and zeros" cartoon.)

Problem was, once people figured out how to write fastloaders that used
the clock wire as an extra data bit, the timing was now off, and all
your 'interleaved' floppies were now slower than the regular ones...

I guess they decided that interleaving wasn't necessary with modern
speeds. Maybe it's time to take a look at it again?

I'm Pretty Sure I Read Somewhere(TM) that they still do that... but
again, with random access, there's no predicting what you're going to
read in what order, and therefore no particular interleaving pattern
that will help.

It's the same reason defragging doesn't help (much) for audio drives.
You can put a single file in order, but you can't possibly lay out 40
tracks in some fashion that's optimal for reading them back in
simultaneously unless you know the exact patterns of the application
that will read them. And even then, adding another track would screw it
up royally.

--
Jay Levitt |
Wellesley, MA | I feel calm. I feel ready. I can only
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | conclude that's because I don't have a
http://www.jay.fm | full grasp of the situation. - Mark Adler