Patent ID: 6711635
Filing Date: 2004-03-23
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
A disk drive comprising:(a) a disk comprising a plurality of tracks, each track comprising a plurality of blocks; (b) a head actuated radially over the disk; (c) a semiconductor memory comprising a cache buffer for caching data written to the disk and data read from the disk, the cache buffer comprising a plurality of segment pools, each segment pool comprising a plurality of cache segments, each cache segment comprises at least one block, and the number of blocks in each cache segment varies between segment pools, wherein: a threshold is associated with a first one of the segment pools and a second one of the segment pools; and the threshold is greater than a size of the cache segments in the first segment pool and less than a size of the cache segments in the second segment pool; and (d) a disk controller for: receiving a host command from a host computer, the host command comprising a command size indicating a number of blocks associated with the host command; and comparing a factor of the command size to the threshold in order to allocate a cache segment from either the first segment pool or the second segment pool.