Patent ID: 8423722

Claim:
A non-volatile memory storage system, comprising: non-volatile storage comprising a plurality of solid-state storage devices; and control circuitry configured to implement: an interface to a host system, the interface configured to receive a plurality of commands from the host system; and a data manager module configured to issue one or more data access requests to the non-volatile storage in response to instructions received from the interface based on the commands from the host system; wherein the instructions are communicated via one of two data paths in the non-volatile memory storage system, the two data paths including: a standard performance data path; and a high performance data path comprising: volatile memory for storing data control structures containing (1) the instructions from the interface to the data manager module and (2) responses to those instructions from the data manager module; and a memory buffer for storing data that are to be transferred between the host system and the non-volatile storage, the data being associated with the commands received from the host system; wherein the data manager module is configured to concurrently process a plurality of instructions from the interface stored in their associated data control structures; and wherein each of the data control structures includes information related to processing of a command from the host system, wherein both the interface and the data manager module are configured to update the information independently, so that the processing of the command can be performed without delay due to copying of command related data from the interface to the data manager module.