NAS Simultaneously Reads Question

[pyschometal]

Hi,

I posted the same question on the Netgear support forum but I haven't got any answers, maybe someone here can help.

The question is about multiple users accessing (reading) the same hard drive at the same time. For instance.
I have a 4 bay Netgear ReadyNAS RN214 with 4xWD Red's, which I have ripped all my DVD's and B/D's onto 4 drives (raid 0) and the nas is plugged into a gigabit switch for network access. I watch media from the nas on my PC and my better half uses a nvidia shield to watch whatever she wants. I have Movies spread over 2 drives and I have TV shows spread over the other 2 drives.

I have recently found that we are accessing items stored on the same drive, not the same file but the same drive for sure. File sizes range from 4-10 gb each.

Am I causing damage to drives by reading 2 large files for the same drive at the same time from different locations?

Any insight would be great.
Thanks.

 

[Kilbane]

The short answer is no damage is being done.

The easiest way to think of this is to imagine any drive being used. Unless you are in a perfect world where no fragmentation on drives happens, while reading any file, the header will be pretty stationary, then accessing another file would cause the header to have to jump back and forth between sectors to read multiple files. Now in the real world, files are spread all over drives and the header will be bouncing all over the platters to read a single file, let alone multiple files. If you think of an OS working, it will be required to access files in for example the system folder, then the folder for the program you are using and maybe even another program running in the background.

Drives are designed for this very thing. On a NAS server, the OS is often on a separate memory storage such as a ROM partition to allow the drives to be easily swapped in and out when needed. So in this case, you will be using less drive searching/reads while watching 2 separate files than you would if it was in a PC.

Hopefully that helps with your question, it's late and my brain isn't fully engaged anymore, so if there is anything that doesn't quite make sense, let me know.

 

[pyschometal]

Thanks Kilbane, that is good news.

Thank you for the help.