P: Concurrent Hard Disk Access Not Allowed

[Lupus Ranza]

Hi folks,

I observe the following problem having XP SP2 on a Samsung X20 Notebook.

When a process is accessing the harddisk it seems to have exclusive
access, i.e. all other processes have to wait until the exclusive one is
finished. For example:

In VMWare, when I suspend a VM, and big file (200 MB) is created on the
disk to store the VM's state. So, there's a lot disk activity, takes
some seconds. While VMWare is creating this file, I switch to another
OpenOffice. Everything is fine. But as soon as this OO tries to access
the hard disk it stalls until the VMWare is finished. It seems like OO
to access the disk until VMWare has finished. I thought, concurrent disk
access is allowed?

Lupus

 

[Yves Leclerc]

I know that concurrent disk access is allow on SCSI hardware and not on most
IDE. I am not surre about VMWare.

 

[Lupus Ranza]

I know that concurrent disk access is allow on SCSI hardware and not on most
IDE. I am not surre about VMWare.

Don't misunderstand me -- it was not an issue about VMWare. I just gave
just an example of some concurrent disk access.

Lupus