Patent ID: 8117414

Claim:
A method for prioritized erasure of a non-volatile storage device, the method comprising: providing a plurality of flash units within the storage device, wherein each of the flash units has a plurality of blocks controlled by a single controller contained within the storage device, each block having an erasure priority; writing data in parallel across blocks of different flash units through the single controller, wherein an erasure priority is assigned to the data based on a position of the corresponding block the data is written; logging the erasure priority of the data in each of the blocks in a table of the storage device after writing the data; receiving an erase command from the single controller; generating a logical erase slice identifying one of the blocks to be erased within each of the flash units, the identifying based on each one of the blocks of the logical erase slice having the same erasure priority, wherein at least one of the blocks to be erased has a different relative address within a flash unit than another one of the blocks; and partially erasing the data within each block of the logical erase slice in parallel, wherein the partially erasing is executed according to the erasure priority and wherein the partially erasing is set for a time period that is a maximum of 50% of a full erase time period for a single block of the logical erase cycle, and wherein the data within each block remains partially erased.