Patent ID: 8117489

Claim:
A disk drive, comprising: a non-volatile memory that is incapable of being overwritten more than a limited number of times; a disk; and a controller comprising a memory management table used to manage a correlation between a logical block address and a physical address of the non-volatile memory; wherein, in absence of a replaceable region in the non-volatile memory and in response to an occurrence of a failure to write data in a region, defined as a failure region, in the non-volatile memory at a first physical address correlated with a first logical block address, the controller is configured to write the data at a second physical address correlated with a second logical block address of the non-volatile memory different from the first logical block address, and is configured to correlate in the memory management table the first logical block address with the second physical address, wherein a first region, which is configured to store data that cannot be invalidated without an instruction from a host system, and a second region, which is configured to store data that can be invalidated without an instruction from the host system, are provided in the non-volatile memory; wherein the memory management table is configured to have information used to distinguish between the first region and the second region in correlation with a logical block address of the non-volatile memory; and wherein the controller is configured to select, as the second logical block address of the non-volatile memory, a logical block address corresponding to a region included in the second region with reference to the memory management table.