OPTIMIZING ACCESS TO MULTIPLEXED DATA STREAMS ON A COMPUTER SYSTEM WITH LIMITED MEMORY

A system and method accelerate access time to multiplexed data streams. Data streams are stored in a storage medium (120), and a link allocation table (LAT) (160), which is stored in the storage medium (120), maps blocks of a data stream to sectors of the storage medium (120). The LAT (160) is organized as a set of linked lists, and each data stream is associated with a different linked list in the LAT (160). Each link in a linked list includes the sector location for a different block of the data steam. Traversing the links of the linked list gives the sector location of each subsequent block of data. Each data stream is also associated with a cache memory (140). For each link of a linked list that is traversed, a cache interface (150) writes into an appropriate cache (140) the sector location information stored in the link. When the sector location of a block in a data stream is desired, the cache interface (150) consults the appropriate cache (140) associated with the data stream to determine whether the sector location of the block has been cached. If the information has been cached, the information is retrieved from the cache (140), and the LAT (160) is not used. If the sector location has not been cached, the cache interface (150) determines the last sector location to have been cached, and the appropriated linked list in the LAT (160) is traversed from the entry corresponding to the last sector location cached.