Wide Finder bugs me... more than one thread doing disk reads is probably a Really Bad Idea

That must be some PC; the fastest 7200 RPM disk can transfer 100MB/s.

There is an engineering tradeoff here; doing I/O in multiple threads introduces seeks, but it simplifies the code dramatically. Using one thread for I/O will introduce data copies and locking for the work queue.

If all your drives support tagged queueing then it's probably okay.

Is it related to a Wide Stance?