"But that could only work if each 'task' had its own, separate, physical drive." I do not believe that is true. When one partitions a drive I think the hardware for the hard drive will split up the sectors sequentially and that the hard drive will reserve sectors for each partition like the C drive will begin at 100 and end at 800 and D drive will begin 801 and go to 1000. As, far as the individual task goes.... there is still an efficiency about having the storage split up to minimize the amount of work the physical drive has to do. I've been kinda interested in this stuff for quite some time... so if people have been in the industry and would like to elaborate, I would really appreciate the information.

Edit:
Just looked at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

One can also "Short Stroke", which aims to minimize performance-eating head repositioning delays by reducing the number of tracks used per hard drive. The basic idea is that you make one partition approx. 20-25% of the total size of the drive. This partition is expected to: occupy the outer tracks of the hard drive, and offer more than double the throughput — less than half the access time. If you limit capacity with short stroking, the minimum throughput stays much closer to the maximum.

Of course, one looks for the mechanical understandings of these guys and it becomes a nightmare.
If you want to short stroke your own dirve drive http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/s...,2157.html