Patent ID: 7975119

Claim:
A non-volatile storage device having prioritized-erasure capabilities, the device comprising: a storage memory for storing data in the storage device, said storage memory having a plurality of flash units, wherein each flash unit has a plurality of blocks; and a storage-device controller in communication with the storage memory and residing within the non-volatile storage device, the storage-device controller configured to write data across blocks of different flash units and to assign an erasure priority to the data based on a position of the corresponding block the data is stored, the storage-device controller having a table stored therein, the table tracking the erasure priority of the data stored in each of the blocks, the storage-device controller mapping the erasure priority of the data to the corresponding block the data is stored in, wherein in response to an erase command the storage device controller partially erases the data within each block in parallel based on the mapping, such that the storage-device controller partially erases blocks of the plurality of flash units with the same erasure priority.