Patent ID: 8432633

Claim:
A method of partitioning data tracks on a disk of bit patterned media in a hard disk drive, comprising: providing the disk with pages having a storage architecture of at least one of erase band mode (EBM), shingled mode (SM) and empty space; counting an amount of empty space and a number of EBM pages; assessing if the amount of empty space is above a selected threshold and, if so, assessing if any SM pages can be converted to EBM pages; converting SM pages to EBM pages; updating a status of converted pages and mapping between a user data location and a physical data location before returning to the counting step; determining if the number of EBM pages is sufficient to allow consolidation if the amount of empty space is not above the selected threshold; consolidating SM pages and returning to the updating step; consolidating the EBM pages into SM pages if the number of EBM pages is sufficient to allow consolidation; and returning to the updating step.