Patent ID: 8127294

Claim:
A method for handling conflicting deadlines by a disk drive, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of requests from a plurality of applications for accessing the disk drive, the plurality of requests comprising a first request and a subsequent request; determining a plurality of service times for the plurality of requests by the disk drive, wherein a service time of the plurality of service times specifies a deadline for serving the first request and a deadline for serving the subsequent request of the plurality of requests; determining an actual schedule for serving the first request and the second request; serving the first request of the plurality of requests prior to the actual schedule when a deadline for serving the first request and a deadline for serving the subsequent request of the plurality of requests cannot be simultaneously met by the disk drive using the actual schedule; and serving the subsequent request after the first request is served by the disk drive; wherein the deadline for serving the first request comprises at least one of a seek time for seeking data from the disk drive and a transfer time for transferring the data.