sighting of one head per track in the wild
The first mini computer I worked on was a Data General Eclipse. There was only 64KB of memory, but the time-sharing was such that every login got basically the whole memory, and they were time-shared / swapped out periodically. Our swap disk was several MB, but the fancy thing was it had one head for EVERY TRACK. So there was no head movement, the only latency was the disk rotation and on average you'd be in a pretty decent place to read the data you want within 1/2 a rotation.
last updated 4 days ago