Seagate Technology Incorporated

Merle E Thowe

Zine-Eddine Boutaghou

Mark Alan Heath

He Huang

An improved disc head for increased wear protection. The disc head includes wear members , formed proximate to transducer elements of a thin film head. The wear members are formed along a portion of a lower surface of the head facing the disc surface and are formed of a relatively hard material for increasing wear resistance of the head, proximate to the transducer elements

Disc head with contact protection feature

A method and apparatus are disclosed for improving data transfer rate performance in a multi-drive array configured as a redundant array of inexpensive discs (RAID). The array comprises at least first and second disc drives each comprising a rotatable disc on which a plurality of tracks are defined. An array controller is operably coupled to the disc drives to stripe data across the first and second disc drives using a common bus architecture. Logical block addresses (LBAs) are assigned to each of a plurality of data blocks of the tracks of the drives and are grouped into a number of zones, each zone having nominally the same number of LBAs. Data are thereafter transferred to and from the drives on a zone-basis, so that a block of data of determined size is divided between the first and second disc drives at a selected ratio so that a greater percentage of the block of data is written to the first zone as compared to the second zone.

Multi-drive array with improved data transfer rate performance

An apparatus and associated method are disclosed for optimizing the data transfer performance of a disc drive in which user data is stored in data blocks arranged on tracks of at least one rotating disc. When a selected, uninterrupted amount of time passes since the most recently performed disc drive operation, the disc drive enters an idle mode and selectively evaluates the data blocks for uncorrected read errors. During the idle mode, at such time that a selected data block is found having an uncorrected error, a sequence of corrective operations are performed in an attempt to resolve the error and the selected data block is reallocated when at least selected one of the corrective actions are unsuccessful.

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Yukon, OK, United States of America

Merle E Thowe