Described is a storage system and method for reducing power consumption in a storage system by shortening seek distances associated with input/output (I/O) requests to a physical disk drive. A sweep direction is set. An offset of a new I/O request is evaluated to determine whether to send the new I/O request to the physical disk drive. The new I/O request is sent to the physical disk drive if the offset is consistent with the sweep direction. Otherwise, sending the new I/O request to the disk drive is deferred until the sweep direction is set to a reverse direction.