In a method for dynamically managing a digital recording system's bandwidth requirements, accesses to the recording system's hard drive are prioritized according to a pre-defined policy which gives the first priority to the data streams being written to the disk, the second priority to the data streams being read from the disk, and the third priority to other accesses to the disk. The recording system's bandwidth efficiency may also be improved by optimizing allocation of the disk's storage space which is partitioned into lower bandwidth portions and higher bandwidth portions, where lower bandwidth data streams are stored in lower bandwidth portions and higher bandwidth data streams are stored in higher bandwidth portions. The inner portions of the disk are lower bandwidth portions and thus data streams are recorded from the inner diameter outwards to the outer diameter of the disk. A recorded data stream may be migrated from a higher bandwidth portion to a lower bandwidth portion. |