US Patent 8949489 Method for combining bulk and latency-sensitive input and output

Systems, mediums, and methods are provided for scheduling input/output requests to a storage system. The input output requests may be received, categorized based on their priority, and scheduled for retrieval from the storage system. Lower priority requests may be divided into smaller sub-requests, and the sub-requests may be scheduled for retrieval only when there are no pending higher priority requests, and/or when higher priority requests are not predicted to arrive for a certain period of time. By servicing the small sub-requests rather than the entire lower priority request, the retrieval of the lower priority request may be paused in the event that a high priority request arrives while the lower priority request is being serviced.