[droffel]

If you've got slow HDDs, the usual solution is to RAID them together. At that point your limiter starts becoming how fast you can slurp data down the line. RAID-0 would sort of emulate what you're talking about here.

[R0b0t1]

That still trades off density for speed, having independent arms would be a huge benefit.

[rbanffy]

Would it still be cheaper than a similar SSD? Would it be cheaper than an SSD-augmented HD?

[droffel]

> That still trades off density for speed

It does not. RAID-0 has no duplication, it acts effectively like your independent arms. No density tradeoff, just speed.

[R0b0t1]

There is a tradeoff: With RAID0 your parallelization for read or write is on the scale of 24TB chunks, not within 24TB chunks.