Broadly speaking a method and an apparatus is provided for distributing commands to a digital data storage system. More specifically, the method and apparatus distributes read commands to a mirrored pair of disk drives in a substantially balanced manner. A read command having an associated starting address is received from an operating system. An address range is updated based on the starting address associated with the read command. A determination is made as to a portion of the address range containing the starting address associated with the read command. The read command is directed to be performed using a disk drive associated with the portion of the address range determined to contain the starting address.