Method of mapping logical sectors to physical sectors in a disk drive sparing partition

Abstract

A disk drive includes a disk having a plurality of tracks. The disk is formatted so that the tracks are grouped into zones. Each of the tracks within a zone on a particular surface of the disk is written with the same data rate. The disk is formatted with sectors having no sector ID fields. The disk also includes groupings of tracks called sparing partitions. Sparing partitions generally contain less tracks than the number of tracks within a zone. A desired number of spare sectors are placed in each sparing partition and some of the spare sectors are used at manufacture while at least one of the spare sectors in sparing partition is reserved for future use. The disk also includes spare tracks and the disk drive has the capability of identifying bad tracks or defects in the servo areas of a track which make it difficult for the transducer to track follow. Bad tracks are skipped and a spare track is used. Tables, stored redundantly in a reserve area or reserve zone, store the location of all the bad sectors and tracks for converting logical block addresses to physical locations on the disk so that data or information can be found on the disk. The parameters of the zone in which the tables rare kept is optimized to insure that the tables can be read from the disk. The parameters of data zones can also be optimized to the performance capability of the individual head to disk interfaces.

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