This story (and variants) dates back to the IBM2314 disk drive, if not further.
I'd be more inclined to believe the 2314 variant - it was a disk drive from the mid 60s, 10 platters, 14" no less, a data capacity of 29 megabytes. Oh, and it only did like 3600 RPM and min seek times were in the 50-75ms range (and full-stroke seeks took a lot longer). As a result, you had a lot more mass in the arm assembly, and the full inside-to-outside cycle was down nearer to 100hz where it might conceivably do something useful.
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