Daniel S Mahashin

US Patent:

20060008257, Jan 12, 2006

Filed:

Mar 25, 2005

Appl. No.:

11/089459

Inventors:

Daniel Mahashin - Sunnyvale CA, US
Matthieu Jeanson - Sunnyvale CA, US
John Su - Santa Clara CA, US
Jeremy Alves - Mountain View CA, US

International Classification:

H04N 5/781

US Classification:

386124000, 386125000

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).