Twin-actuators for ultra-fast access in CD-ROM systems

This paper describes the principle of the twin-actuator CD-ROM drive and the improvement it brings to the access performance. After a brief introduction, a novel one-sledge twin-actuator construction is presented which leads to very short seek times. An adaptive twin-actuator construction is also described. Finally, some calculations for systems with two independent actuators are carried out. The seek performance of a twin-actuator drive is calculated as related to a standard CD-ROM benchmark.