[gregmac]

You can! Well, sort of. (this is new to me, I was curious as well, so thank you)

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) [1] is a SATA extension that lets the drive optimize the order commands are performed in. For HDDs, this means it can do the commands in an order that minimizes overall seeking time. For SSDs, it can concurrently execute commands that are operating on different physical chips.

I can't find a good reference, but it seems like this is also true for RAID volumes, which are almost certainly being used on the server -- the RAID controller can perform parallel reads on each of the independent disks. How well this works is highly dependent on the RAID controller itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing