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US 9,003,103 B2Granted
Nonvolatile media dirty region tracking
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorsEmanuel Paleologu, Karan Mehra, Darren Moss
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AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorsEmanuel Paleologu, Karan Mehra, Darren Moss
Estimating the term…
A storage set (e.g., an array of hard disk drives) may experience a failure, such as a loss of power, a software crash, or a disconnection of a storage device, while writes to the storage set are in progress. Recover from the failure may involve scanning the storage set to detect and correct inconsistencies (e.g., comparing mirrors of a data set or testing checksums). However, lacking information about the locations of pending writes to the storage set during the failure, this “cleaning” process may involve scanning the entire storage set, resulting in protracted recovery processes. Presented herein are techniques for tracking writes to the storage set by apportioning the storage set into regions of a region size (e.g., one gigabyte), and storing on the nonvolatile storage medium descriptors of “dirty” regions comprising in-progress writes. The post-failure recovery process may then be limited to the regions identified as dirty.
A method of recording writes pending within a storage set provided by at least one storage device, the method comprising:
A method of cleaning a storage set comprising at least two data sets respectively stored by at least one storage device, respective storage devices comprising a region descriptor apportioning the storage set stored on the storage device into at least two regions according to a region size, the method comprising:
A computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that, when executed on a processor of a computer, cause the computer to record writes pending within a storage set provided by at least one storage device, by:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.