Patent ID: 7355940

Claim:
An optical disk apparatus comprising: an optical head which applies or receives a laser beam to or from an optical disk including an information recording layer, to perform recording or reproducing processing; a waiting position determination unit which detects a wave reflected from the optical disk using the optical head, discriminates an unrecorded region from a recorded region based on a height of reflectivity or reflectivity distribution of the optical disk corresponding to the detected wave, and determines, as a waiting position, a position in the recorded region two or more tracks away from a boundary between the unrecorded region and the recorded region, after the recording or the reproducing processing is finished; and a control unit which moves the optical head to the waiting position, shifts the waiting position by a preset amount away from the boundary and moves the optical head to the shifted waiting position, when there is no instruction to perform recording processing or reproduction processing even after a preset time elapses, and performs control for shifting the optical disk apparatus to a power-saving state in which various servo states other then focus servo are made to holding states or open states, and only the focus servo is kept to be performed.