Abstract  Real-timedisk scheduling (RTDS) is important for time-critical multimediaapplications. In conventional approaches of real-time disk scheduling,such as SCAN-EDF, the seek-optimizing SCAN scheme is appliedto reduce the disk service time of the real-time EDF schedule.Since only tasks with the same deadline are seek-optimized, theobtained improvement of SCAN-EDF is limited. In this paper, basedon the maximum-scannable-group (MSG) concept, a deadline-modification-scan (DMS or DM-SCAN) algorithm is proposed.Our algorithm uses MSG to automatically decide the suitable taskgroups for seek-optimizing. Based on the MSG concept, we repeatedlyapply DMS to further increase disk throughput to support moretasks. We have implemented the proposed algorithm on UnixWare2.01. The appropriate problem behaviors and parameter valuesto yield good solutions are investigated. Experiments show thatDMS is better than conventional approaches in both the obtaineddisk throughput and the supported tasks. Moreover, our proposedapproach can schedule task sets that are not schedulable by EDFand SCAN-EDF.