Maxtor Corporation

Steve McCarthy

Curtis W Egan

Don Brunnett

John L Seabury

Uwe Schwiegelshohn

David Winters

A method for creating a high efficiency, error minimizing code is provided. In addition, an apparatus having a high efficiency, error minimizing code is provided. In particular, the present invention provides a high efficiency, error minimizing code for use in connection with systems having a communication channel in which identifiable dominant errors occur, and that is used to transmit data that may be usefully applied in the system even though the received signal is not exactly equal to the original signal. Furthermore, the present invention provides a code that may be used to constrain the effects of dominant errors in a communication channel.

High efficiency, error minimizing coding strategy method and apparatus

A method and apparatus for detecting flaws requiring sparing of portions of storage media included as part of a hard disk drive are provided. A window of a selected portion of the storage medium is formed, and the density of defects detected within that window is calculated. If the density of defects exceeds a threshold amount, a signal is passed to the controller. The portion of the storage media containing the defects that caused the generation of the flag may then be spared. The present invention allows the potential for detected defects to significantly affect the ability of the storage medium to be assessed. Furthermore, the present invention does not require that the location of each defect be stored in memory. Accordingly, the present invention is economical to implement, and allows defects to be assessed in substantially real time and with improved accuracy.

Method and apparatus for identifying defective areas on a disk surface of a disk drive based on defect density

A method and apparatus for increasing formatting efficiency of a disk drive is disclosed. In one embodiment, a method for storing data in a disk drive is provided. The disk drive is coupled to a computer via an interface. The method includes the steps of storing data on a disk surface in a disk block having a predetermined length; and, presenting data from the disk drive to the interface as a host block having a predetermined length, wherein the predetermined length of the disk block is equal to N times the predetermined length of the host block, where N is a natural number greater than 1. In one embodiment, a read/modify/write procedure is provided to ensure that data is not lost when a power failure occurs during a write operation when the number of host blocks being written is not a multiple of N.

Method and apparatus for data storage in a disk drive

A byte wide flaw scan interface is used to identify an characterize flaws in a disk medium. In one embodiment, the associated disk drive ( ) includes head electronics ( ) associated with a disk drive controller ( ) via an NRZ interface ( ). The NRZ interface ( ) is operative for transmitting flaw information for a particular disk address via 8 predefined bit lines. The bit lines have separate definitions for user data sector addresses and servo wedge addresses. By using this byte wide interface, media flaws of various types can be identified and characterized based on a single pass of the transducer head over the disk surface thereby shortening testing times.

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Mead, CO, United States of America

Steve McCarthy