Supporting continuous media data-such as video and audio-imposes stringent demands on the retrieval performance of a multimedia server. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a set of data placement and retrieval algorithms to exploit the full capacity of the disks in a multimedia server. The data placement algorithm declusters every object over all of the disks in the server-using a time-based declustering unit-with the aim of balancing the disk load. As for runtime retrieval, the quintessence of the algorithm is to give each disk advance notification of the blocks that have to be fetched in the impending time periods, so that the disk can optimize its service schedule accordingly. Moreover, in processing a block request for a replicated object, the server will dynamically channel the retrieval operation to the most lightly loaded disk that holds a copy of the required block. We have implemented a multimedia server based on these algorithms. Performance tests reveal that the server achieves very high disk efficiency. Specifically, each disk is able to support up to 25 MPEG-1 streams. Moreover, experiments suggest that the aggregate retrieval capacity of the server scales almost linearly with the number of disks.