One of my cow-orkers did some work back around 2003 based on the finding reported in this paper:

    "Trail : A Fast Synchronous Write Disk Subsystem Using Track-Based Logging" by Tzi-cker Chiueh and Lan Huang

...but I'm having a hard time finding a non-paywalled version now since many of the URLs in the search results have suffered bit-rot. Those findings dovetail with those mentioned here in that he used the true/discovered disk geometry map to allow him to stream data onto the disk very fast by writing to the specific sectors that were known to be arriving under the heads RIGHT NOW, which caused the data to appear out-of-order when accessed later via sequential LBA block numbers but could be reordered using that same map. (If somebody finds a non-paywalled version, please share...)