>I can't grasp how 8 separate tracks can be laid onto the hard drive simultaneously.
It does this by writing separate files to the drive at the same time. The Disc operating system only knows to find an empty spot on the drive and write the data and if there is a discontinuity in the stream of data for a file, a link to the address of the rest of that file is stored.
Basically it boils down to how many bytes can be written or read per second. That is the real ceiling for the # of tracks that can be written or read simultaneously.
Even my old PII could read 36 tracks of 16bit/44.1KHz audio at once.