> bar fixed in place that spans entire radius of the writable surface, with an addressable strip of r/w heads that runs the length of it.
That was called a fixed-head disk. They got rid of seek latency (still had rotational latency) and so there was a market niche for them as (e.g.) swap devices, but they had lower data density than moving-head disks did, so they went out of style. It looks like they are so obscure today that there's no wikipedia article, but here's an article from some other wiki:
They are briefly mentioned in the general Wikipedia article on hard disk drives. There was also "drum memory" where there was a head per track on a cylindrical recording surface. Those seem to have dried up even earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
Here's an info page about the DEC RS03 and RS04 from the 1970s. The RS04 weighed 120 pounds and had 1MB of capacity.
There's probably an insane data throughput domain that requires autocorrelation filters that might benefit from an optic fibre bundle in which each fibre is slightly shorter than the previous one.
That was called a fixed-head disk. They got rid of seek latency (still had rotational latency) and so there was a market niche for them as (e.g.) swap devices, but they had lower data density than moving-head disks did, so they went out of style. It looks like they are so obscure today that there's no wikipedia article, but here's an article from some other wiki:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Fixed-head_disk
They are briefly mentioned in the general Wikipedia article on hard disk drives. There was also "drum memory" where there was a head per track on a cylindrical recording surface. Those seem to have dried up even earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
Here's an info page about the DEC RS03 and RS04 from the 1970s. The RS04 weighed 120 pounds and had 1MB of capacity.
https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2019/02/19/history-1974-de...