Described is a system (and technique) to determine an appropriate path to a storage device and scheduling a data transfer by taking into consideration bandwidth, device performance, and the nature of the transfer. The system may use an efficient implementation to reduce overhead when making such a determination by utilizing a reservation table and selecting a dispatch that is efficient for a particular data transfer. For example, the system may determine a first-fit and a future-fit scheduling for an I/O request for each path to a storage device. The system may determine completion times for each of the types of scheduling for each of the paths, and accordingly, select the path and schedule with the earliest completion time.