Physical subsector error marking
AssigneeSeagate Technology LLC
InventorsWeihua Lin, Brian Thomas Edgar, Gerald Allen Houlder, Yong Yang, Shuangyi Tang, Vidya Krishnamurthy
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Physical subsector error marking allows for selectively marking subsectors of a physical sector of a storage medium as unreadable. The error marking may include a bad sector mask to indicate that the subsector is unreadable combined with an error signature to confirm that the bad sector mask was set intentionally. The remaining readable subsectors of the physical sector may be returned to the host.
Claims20
A method comprising:
- marking a subsector of a physical sector on a storage medium with a code stored in a prepend of the subsector that indicates that user data stored in the subsector is unreadable.
A storage medium comprising:
- a physical sector divided into subsectors, wherein a subsector contains a code stored in a prepend of the subsector that indicates user data stored in the subsector is unrecoverable.
One or more computer-readable storage media encoding computer-executable instructions for executing on a computer system a computer process comprising:
- reading a subsector prepend of a physical sector of a storage medium;
- determining if the prepend contains a bad sector mask;
- and
- returning an error that the subsector is unreadable to the host.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.