Patent ID: 7596657

Claim:
A method of increasing the storage capacity of a solid state disk (SSD) device through data compression, the SSD coupled to a host computer system and comprising a non-volatile storage module (NVSM) and a volatile memory (VM), said method comprising: associating the SSD with a predetermined compression ratio of n to 1, where n is a value greater than 1; reporting an initial virtual storage capacity to the host computer system that is n times the physical storage capacity of the VM; establishing an overflow buffer in the NVSM; monitoring the available virtual capacity of the VM based on the current compression ratio and the amount of data currently stored therein; storing data to the overflow buffer whenever the available virtual capacity falls below that necessary to successfully process a pending storage operation requested by the host computer system; and populating data stored in the overflow buffer to the VM when the amount of available virtual capacity of the VM can accommodate the data.