Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Dean L DeWhitt

Patrick L Stemen

Michael Richard Fortin

John M Parchem

Clark David Nicholson

William Jefferson Westerinen

Cenk Ergan

Michael James Zwilling

Mark Joseph Zbikowski

Hanumantha Rao Kodavalla

Nathan Steven Obr

Rajeev Y Nagar

Therron Powell

Surenda Verma

Dan Teodosiu

Emily Nicole Hill

Tristan Anthony Brown

Nicholas Stephen Judge

Charles Patrick Thacker

Emily Nicole Wilson

W Jeff Westerinen

Daniel Teodosiu

In order to provide a more efficient persistent storage device, one or more long-term storage media are included along with a non-volatile memory. In one embodiment, one portion of the non-volatile memory is used as a write buffer and a read cache for writes and reads to the long-term storage media. Interfaces are provided for controlling the use of the non-volatile memory as a write buffer and a read cache. Additionally, a portion of the non-volatile memory is used to provide a direct mapping for specified sectors of the long-term storage media. Descriptive data regarding the persistent storage device is stored in another portion of the non-volatile memory.

Non-volatile memory cache performance improvement

In embodiments of an idle time service, it can be determined that processing on a device is in an idle state. An execution duration of applications that are scheduled to be executed by a processor of the device can then be extended to reduce power consumption by the device. In other embodiments, it can be determined that an application configured to execute on a device is a background application. The execution duration of the background application can then be extended to reduce power consumption by the device.

Idle time service

A method and apparatus to improve the read/write performance of a hard drive is presented. The hard drive includes solid state, non-volatile (NV) memory as a read/write cache. Data specified by the operating system is stored in the NV memory. The operating system provides a list of data to be put in NV memory. The data includes data to be pinned in NV memory and data that is dynamic. Pinned data persists in NV memory until the operating system commands it to be flushed. Dynamic data can be flushed by the hard drive controller. Data sent by an application for storage is temporary stored in NV memory in data blocks until the operating system commits it to the disk.

Method and apparatus to reduce power consumption and improve read/write performance of hard disk drives using non-volatile memory

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Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Dean L DeWhitt