&gt;Do the methods reading data from the drives consider the number of heads&#x2F;platters involved for performance gains?<p>In general no, at least not since the early 80s. Although you still hear about cylinders, heads, and sectors, spinning hard drives have effectively been a black box to OSes for 30 years and will internally remap sectors wherever they feel like it (and lie about it if you ask them).<p>The result is that while you can be reasonably confident that sector 33566 is followed by sector 33567 and reading both will not involve seeking, things like reading the whole cylinders at a time are not worth the effort since you don&#x27;t know where the sectors are.