The performance of streaming multimedia servers has been limited due to the dual requirements of high throughput and low memory use. Although disk throughputs have been enjoying a 40% annual increase, slower improvements in disk access times necessitate the use of large DRAM buffers to improve overall streaming throughput. MEMS-based storage is an exciting new technology that promises to bridge the widening performance gap between DRAM and disk-drives in the memory hierarchy. This paper explores the impact of integrating these devices into the memory hierarchy on the class of streaming multimedia applications. We evaluate the use of MEMS-based storage devices for buffering and caching real-time streaming data. We also show how a bank of k MEMS devices can be managed in either configuration and that they can provide a k-fold improvement in both throughput and access latency. An extensive analytical study shows that such an addition to the storage hierarchy can reduce the buffering cost and improve the throughput of streaming servers significantly.