Hardware-Based Improvements
Increasing the amount of memory: helps make the buffers larger and thus reduce the numbers of seeks.
Increasing the Number of Dedicated Disk Drives: If we had one separate read/write head for every run, then no time would be wasted seeking.
Increasing the Number of I/O Channels: With a single I/O Channel, no two transmission can occur at the same time. But if there is a separate I/O Channel for each disk drive, then I/O can overlap completely.
But what if hardware based improvements are not possible?