Panasonic Technologies, Inc.

Brian Bershad

Frederick Douglis

Brian D Marsh

Ramon Caceres

Parameshwaran Krishnan

A system and method for reducing access latency to stable storage are described. A technique referred to as fault trickling is used to improve access latency to stable storage such as flash memory. In particular, data requests from a central processing unit are preferentially satisfied by a memory management unit providing access to a main memory. When the requested data does not reside in the main memory, however, the memory management unit satisfies the request by providing direct fine-grain access to the flash memory. In addition, concurrently with satisfying the data request directly from the flash memory, a block transfer is initiated from the flash memory to the main memory. Once the block transfer is completed, a memory map, such as an address translation table, is updated to indicate that the data now resides in the more convenient source of data--the main memory. Accordingly, subsequent data requests, for that or proximately located data, can be satisfied by accessing the main memory.

Method and system for reducing memory access latency by providing fine

A method for managing the power consumed by a disk drive in a portable laptop computer which includes spinning the disk up during period when the computer apparatus is in an active or idle mode, creating a threshold to determine when to spin down the disk as a function of a period of disk inactivity, spinning the disk down when the threshold is exceeded in order to reduce the power consumption of the disk, automatically increasing the threshold when an undesirable spin up of the disk has occurred and automatically decreasing the threshold when an acceptable spin up of the disk occurs. By virtue of this method, the threshold for disk inactivity is continually monitored and adjusted to maintain a balance between energy consumption and undesirable disk spin down.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Brian Bershad