FIS–based switching offers high performance storage connections to multiple drives simultaneously. The host issues and completes commands to drives at any time. The port multiplier will direct data to any drive ready for I/O. An arbitration algorithm ensures a balanced data flow. Unlike Command-based switching, FIS-based switching allows aggregation of reads to fully use the potentially higher bandwidth of the host link and takes full advantage of the performance benefits of Native Command Queuing (NCQ) on the port multiplier, resulting in aggregated throughput of up to the total bandwidth of the host band link.