Low-overhead storage of a hibernation file in a hybrid disk drive
AssigneeKabushiki Kaisha Toshiba
InventorsRichard M. Ehrlich, Eric R. Dunn, Fernando Anibal Zayas, Thorsten Schmidt
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Abstract
A hybrid drive and associated methods provide low-overhead storage of a hibernation file in the hybrid hard disk drive. During operation, the hybrid drive allocates a portion of solid-state memory in the drive that is large enough to accommodate a hibernation file associated with a host device of the hybrid drive. In addition to the erased memory blocks that are normally present during operation of the hybrid drive, the portion of solid-state memory allocated for accommodating the hibernation file may include over-provisioned memory blocks, blocks used to store a previous hibernation file that has been trimmed, and/or non-dirty blocks.
Claims18
A method of hibernating a computer system running in a host in a device having a first nonvolatile memory and a second nonvolatile memory comprising a plurality of memory blocks, the method comprising:
- receiving from the host a hibernate command and a hibernation file associated with the computer system running in the host;
- and
- upon receiving the hibernate command, erasing non-dirty data stored in a portion of the second nonvolatile memory, the portion excluding memory blocks storing dirty data, which represents valid data stored in the second nonvolatile memory but not in the first nonvolatile memory, and storing the hibernation file into the portion of the second nonvolatile memory,
- wherein the non-dirty data represents valid data stored in both the first nonvolatile memory and the second nonvolatile memory, and copies of the non-dirty data and the dirty data are preserved during a garbage collection process.
A storage system comprising:
- a first nonvolatile memory;
- a second nonvolatile memory comprising a plurality of memory blocks;
- and
- a storage controller configured to receive a hibernate command from a host and a hibernation file associated with the host, wherein
- the storage controller erases non-dirty data stored in a portion of the second nonvolatile memory, the portion excluding memory blocks storing dirty data, which represents valid data stored in the second nonvolatile memory but not in the first nonvolatile memory, and
- upon receiving the hibernate command, the storage controller stores the hibernation file into the portion of the second nonvolatile memory,
- wherein the non-dirty data represents valid data stored in both the first nonvolatile memory and the second nonvolatile memory, and copies of the non-dirty data and the dirty data are preserved during a garbage collection process.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.