A system and method for disk ownership in a network storage system. Each disk has two ownership attributes set to show that a particular file server owns the disk. In a preferred embodiment the first ownership attribute is the serial number of the file server being written to a specific location on each disk and the second ownership attribute is setting a SCSI-3 persistent reservation. In a system utilizing this disk ownership method, multiple file servers can read data from a given disk, but only the file server that owns a particular disk can write data to the disk.