Method and apparatus for limiting soft error recovery in a disk drive data storage device
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsHal Hjallmar Ottesen, Gordon James Smith
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A disk drive has on-board soft error recovery procedures for recovering data following a soft error, and the capability to selectively disable or limit this feature. Preferably, a set of data storage devices are used to store heterogeneous data, i.e., to store some alphanumeric data, and some multimedia data. If a disk drive is selected for storage of multimedia data, the soft error recovery is disabled, and soft errors are simply transmitted to the host system as data. If each disk surface may be independently allocated to data of different types, soft error recovery may be independently disabled for each disk surface.
Claims19
A method for managing the storage of data on a rotating magnetic disk drive data storage device, comprising the steps of:
- determining that a portion of said rotating magnetic disk drive data storage device contains only data of a first type, said data of a first type requiring less than full soft error recovery;
- and
- disabling at least one soft error recovery step for said portion of said rotating magnetic disk drive responsive to said determination.
A rotating disk drive data storage device, comprising:
- a disk drive base;
- at least one rotatably mounted disk for recording data on at least one surface of said at least one rotatably mounted disk;
- a movable actuator supporting at least one transducer head, said actuator positioning said at least one transducer head to access data on said at least one surface of said at least one rotatably mounted disk;
- and
- a controller for controlling the operation of said disk drive data storage device, said controller including a soft error recovery function for recovering from soft errors detected during data access, said controller further including a disabling function which disables said soft error recovery function responsive to an external command from a host system;
- wherein said disabling function includes the capability to disable said soft error recovery function with respect to data stored in selective individual portions of the data storage area of said disk drive, said individual portions being less than the entire data storage area of said disk drive.
A control program for a rotating disk drive data storage device, comprising:
- a plurality of processor-executable instructions recorded on signal-bearing media, wherein said instructions, when executed by at least one processor control apparatus of a rotating disk drive data storage device, cause the device to perform the steps of:
- (a) performing a sequence of soft error recovery steps responsive to the detection of a soft error from performing of a data access operation during operation of said rotating disk drive data storage device, at least some of said soft error recovery steps involving re-performing said data access operation;
- (b) receiving a soft error recovery function disable command from an external device;
- and
- (c) disabling at least one soft error recovery step of said sequence of soft error recovery steps for at least a portion of said rotating disk drive storage device responsive to receiving said soft error recovery disable command, wherein at least one of the disabled soft error recovery steps involves re-performing said data access operation.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.