Controller for receiving transfer requests for noncontiguous sectors and reading those sectors as a continuous block by interspersing no operation requests between transfer requests
US5473761A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Mar 28, 1994 |
| Grant date | Dec 5, 1995 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Mar 28, 2014 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F3/0673
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A disk drive array including a controller which provides scatter/scatter (bi-directional scatter/gather) operations between noncontiguous host memory address locations and noncontiguous disk address locations. The host provides a single request to launch a scatter/scatter transfer. The single data request includes a pointer to a list of transfer counts and addresses, the length of the list, and the starting logical address on the disk transfer. Skipped blocks in a scatter/scatter request are specified by data address value of -1, and a no-operation (no-op) request is enqueued for each skipped block. Thus, during reads the controller extends the scattered read from the disk into a single large read of contiguous sectors and suppresses the unwanted data by inserting "no-operation" commands in place of the read commands during the transfer to the host.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.