Patent ID: 7310699

Claim:
A method of improving the performance of reading data from a rotating disk drive, comprising: receiving a first command from a host system to read a burst of data with a defined starting address in the rotating disk drive; determining if the address for the burst of data for the first command is non-contiguous to a previously accessed address; if it has been determined that the address is non-contiguous, then reading the requested data from the rotating disk drive and copying an initial portion of the data to a non-volatile memory device; subsequently receiving a second command from the host system to read a burst of data with the same starting address in the rotating disk drive; determining if the address for the burst of data from the second command is non- contiguous to a previously accessed address; if it has been determined that the address is non-contiguous, then reading the initial portion of the requested data from the non-volatile memory device, and reading the remainder of the requested data from the rotating disk drive, thereby eliminating delay in providing data to the host system caused by seek time in the rotating disk drive.