How to obtain good concurrent read performance from disk

Question

I\'d like to ask a question then follow it up with my own answer, but also see what answers other people have.

We have two large files which we\'d like to read from two

Answer 1

It does seem a little strange that you see no difference across quite a wide range of windows versions and nothing between a single drive and hardware raid-5.

It's only 'gut feel', but that does make me doubtful that this is really a simple seeking problem. Other than the OS X and the Raid5, was all this tried on the same machine - have you tried another machine? Is your CPU usage basically zero during this test?

What's the shortest app you can write which demonstrates this problem? - I would be interested to try it here.