Some data storage systems, such as those containing rotating magnetic storage, magnetic tape, and/or rotating optical storage, suffer from relatively high latency times (e.g., in the milliseconds range or more) to reach a randomly-targeted location within physical storage. Once the targeted location is reached (e.g., via a seek operation), data can be transferred (read or written) relatively sequentially from the physical storage at a reasonably high rate. One of many challenges relating to improving data transfer rates is managing the transfer requests of a host within the constraints of physical location and logical ordering of the requested data within the data storage system.