Coded-Seeking: A Simple HDD Speed-Up Concept

Consider a single hard disk drive (HDD) composed of rotating platters and a single magnetic head. We propose a simple internal coding framework for HDDs that uses coding across drive blocks to reduce average block seek times. In particular, instead of the HDD controller seeking individual blocks, the drive performs coded-seeking: It seeks the closest subset of coded blocks, where a coded block contains partial information from multiple uncoded blocks. Coded-seeking is a tool that relaxes the scheduling of a full traveling salesman problem (TSP) on an HDD into a k-TSP. This may provide opportunities for new scheduling algorithms and to reduce average read times.