Scheduling storage accesses for rate-guaranteed and non-rate-guaranteed requests

1. Field of the Invention A system for managing storage accesses for rate guaranteed continuous multimedia data streams and non-rate-guaranteed storage requests may include a plurality of rate guaranteed requestors for multimedia streams and one or more non-rate guaranteed requesters. A disk scheduler may also be included. The disk scheduler may have a guaranteed rate queue for queuing storage requests from the rate guaranteed requestors and a non-rate-guaranteed queue for queuing requests from the non-rate-guaranteed requestors. The disk scheduler may also include a bandwidth allocator coupled to the guaranteed rate queue and the non-rate-guaranteed queue and further coupled to a storage system. The bandwidth allocator may be configured to allocate bandwidth of the storage system between the guaranteed rate queue and the non-rate-guaranteed queue according to a predetermined ratio. The rate guaranteed requestors may be limited so that an aggregate of maximum stream rates guaranteed for each rate guaranteed requestor does not exceed the portion of the bandwidth allocated to the guaranteed rate queue. Requests may be ordered in the guaranteed rate queue according to a deadline. Requests may be ordered in the non-rate guaranteed queue according to a priority. The system may also include a buffer ring for each multimedia data stream from one of the rate guaranteed requestors.