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US 2006/0080501 A1Published application
HDD having both dram and flash memory
AssigneeHitachi Global Storage Technologies
InventorsDaniel Auerbach, Jorge Campello, Frank Chu, Spencer Ng
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A mobile computing hard disk drive has both a flash memory device and a DRAM device, with the HDD controller managing data storage between disk, DRAM, and flash both when write requests arrive and when the HDD is idle to optimize flash memory device life and system performance.
Claims23
A hard disk drive (HDD), comprising:
- at least one disk storing data;
- at least one Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) device;
- at least one flash memory device;
- and
- at least one disk controller managing data storage by executing logic including, at least in part:
- receiving a write request;
- determining whether the DRAM device is full and if not, writing data to the DRAM device to satisfy the write request;
- otherwise at least some of the time
- determining whether the flash memory device is full, and if not, destaging data from the DRAM device to the flash memory device and then writing data to the DRAM device to satisfy the write request, otherwise if the flash memory device is full spinning up the disk if not already spinning and destaging data from the flash memory device to the disk, then destaging data from the DRAM device to the flash memory device, then writing data to the DRAM device to satisfy the write request.
6 more elements
A chip configured for placement within a hard disk drive (HDD) having at least one disk, the chip comprising:
- means for destaging data from a DRAM device to a flash memory device if the disk is not spinning;
- and
- means for destaging data from the flash memory device to the disk if the disk is spinning.
A computer program product executable by a processing apparatus to undertake method acts comprising:
- managing data storage in a hard disk drive (HDD) having at least one rotatable disk, at least one non-volatile solid state memory device, and at least one volatile solid state memory device at least when power is available to the HDD, both when the disk is spinning and not spinning.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.