Hybrid surface format hard disk drive
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorDaniel F. Smith
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Embodiments of the invention relate to a hard disk drive (HDD) formatted with at least two surfaces, each of the surfaces serviced a write head, each write head configured for the respective surface. At least one of the surfaces of the HDD is serviced by a random block overwrite (RBO) head for an associated surface. Similarly, at least one of the surfaces of the HDD is serviced by a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) head for an associated SMR surface. The properties of both the RBO and SMR surfaces are retained, and at the same time leveraged to maximize data density and write performance in a single HDD.
Claims20
A method comprising:
- formatting a hard disk drive (HDD) with a plurality of data heads and associated data surfaces, including at least one data head optimized for shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to a SMR surface of the HDD, and at least one data head optimized for random block overwrite (RBO) to a RBO surface of the HDD.
A computer program product for leveraging surfaces of a hard disk drive (HDD), the computer program product comprising a compute readable storage device having program code embodied therewith, the program code executable by a processing unit to:
- format the hard disk drive (HDD) with a plurality of data heads and associated data surfaces, including at least one data head formatted for shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to a SMR surface of the HDD, and at least one data head formatted for random block overwrite (RBO) to a RBO surface of the HDD;
- and
- read and write data to the SMR and RBO formatted surfaces, including leveraging random write performance with the RBO formatted surface and storage density with the SMR formatted surface.
A computer system comprising:
- a processing unit operatively coupled to memory and a hard disk drive (HDD), the HDD having a dual format;
- the HDD having a plurality of data heads and associated data surfaces, including at least one data head formatted for shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to a SMR surface of the HDD, and at least one data head formatted for random block overwrite (RBO) to a RBO surface of the HDD;
- and
- a tool in communication with the processing unit, the tool to read and write data to the SMR and RBO formatted surfaces, including leveraging random write performance with the RBO formatted surface and storage density with the SMR formatted surface.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.