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:
Aug. 11, 2009
Filed:
Mar. 25, 2005
Daniel Mahashin, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Matthieu Jeanson, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
John Su, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Jeremy Alves, Mountain View, CA (US);
Daniel Mahashin, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Matthieu Jeanson, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
John Su, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Jeremy Alves, Mountain View, CA (US);
Magnum Semiconductor, Inc., Milpitas, CA (US);
Abstract
A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is provided two FATs and two cluster sizes, a regular cluster and a 'Supercluster'. In one example, each Supercluster is the size of four regular clusters. A second Supercluster FAT is added (FAT2) which works in a similar manner to the original FAT (hereinafter FAT1), but instead points to the next Supercluster in the chain. Since there are far fewer Superclusters than clusters, the Supercluster FAT (FAT2) can be stored in a cache memory. When data is streamed to and from the hard drive, it can be streamed to Superclusters and no seeks on the HDD to a FAT are required, as the FAT2 is cached in memory. Access time to and from the hard drive is decreased. The original cluster configuration is still supported. During lulls in system operation, the FAT2 data may be written to the drive and moreover, FAT1 data created and 'flushed' to the hard drive. Thus, if the HDD is read by a standard computer system, it will recognize the regular clusters from the FAT1 table in a transparent manner (and ignore the FAT2 table).