Most work on multimedia storage systems has assumed that client will be serviced using a round-robin strategy. The server services the clients in rounds and each client is allocated a time slice within that round. Furthermore, most such algorithms are evaluated on the basis of a tightly coupled cost function. This is the basis of well-known algorithm such as FCFS, SCAN, SCAN-EDF, etc. In this paper, we describe a scheduling module called Request Unifier(RU) that takes as input, a set of client request, and a set of constraints on the desired performance such as client waiting time or maximum disk bandwidth, and a cost function. It produces as output a Unified Read Request(URR), telling the storage server which data items to read and when these data items to be delivered to the clients. Given a cost function, a URR is optimal if there is no other URR satisfying the constraints with a lower cost. We present three algorithms in this paper that can accomplish this kind of request merging and compare their performance through an experimental evaluation.