The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 20, 2001
Filed:
Sep. 25, 1997
Eli Shagam, Brookline, MA (US);
EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA (US);
Abstract
An apparatus for defragmenting disks by incorporating a copy function in the logic controlling a disk, so that a disk can be instructed to copy the contents of tracks from one area to another on the disk without requiring a series of data transfers between the disk and the host computer to which it is assigned. Conventional defragmentation techniques can be used to determine which files need to be defragmented and how much contiguous free space is available on the disk. Once this has been determined, the present invention enables the defragmentation program to send copy commands to the disk to cause the copy function in the logic controlling the disk to perform the data transfers, thus freeing up the host computer to perform other processing until the logic controlling the disk signals completion of the copy function's operation.