[jquery]

You're underselling what HDDs do. The seeks they have to do are so precision, if you made the hard drive the size of the earth, the "head" would still only be a couple meters from the ground and it would have to go any square meter on the entire earth in 1/100 of a second. It's absolutely incredible that the tiny SATA bay in my computer holds an 18TB drive. That's 18 * 8 trillion bits of data, or if the hard drive had the surface area of the earth, 282 bits per square meter.

This precision structure has to be maintained at 10k RPM. Can it be maintained at 20k RPM? Maybe not so easily. Let's not undersell the technology.

[pengaru]

You're ignoring the statement I'm actually responding to:

"Part of the problem is keeping the platters together at those speeds"

I'm not speaking to seeking or precision at all, only pointing out there's not really any challenge in keeping the platters together at these speeds.

[jquery]

okay, i guess in my mind I automatically translate “coming apart at those speeds” to “the microstructure stretches to a degree it’s impossible to read/write to the drives”. Nothing catastrophic.