Patent ID: 7802054

Claim:
A storage system, comprising: a non-volatile storage medium configured to store data; an interface coupled to a host which includes a central processing unit and a main memory, wherein the interface receives write storage data and an invalidity information from the host, and transmits read storage data to the host in response to read requests received from the host; a buffer memory which temporarily stores the write storage data received by the interface; and a memory controller, which manages a mapping table containing write state information, and which updates the write state information contained in the mapping table according to invalidity information received by the interface, automatically executes a data transcribe operation without intervention of the host with reference to the updated write state information contained in the mapping table, and executes read operations in which the read storage data is transmitted to the host by the interface in response to the read requests received from the host; wherein the mapping table maps a memory location of the buffer memory to a memory location of the non-volatile storage medium; wherein the data transcribe operation includes transferring write storage data indicated as valid by the updated write state information from the buffer memory to a memory location in the non-volatile storage medium specified by the mapping table, and not transferring write storage data indicated as invalid by the updated write state information from the buffer memory to the memory location in the non-volatile storage medium specified by the mapping table; and wherein, in the read data operations, the memory controller is responsive to each read request received from the host to read the read storage data from the non-volatile storage medium.