Patent ID: 6925526

Claim:
A method of operating a disk drive data storage device, comprising: receiving a plurality of commands for accessing data in said data storage device, wherein at least some of said commands are short block write commands, each short block write command specifying a respective write of a block size N to a data area on said disk drive formatted for a block size M, where M>N; maintaining an internal queue of data access operations; with respect to at least some of said short block write commands, (a) generating a respective short block cache write operation for said internal queue, each said short block cache write operation specifying a write to a reserved cache area on a disk surface of said disk drive, said reserved cache area being formatted for storing blocks of size N, (b) notifying a host of completion of the short block write command after completion of the corresponding short block cache write operation, (c) generating a respective read operation for said internal queue, each said read operation reading a respective block of size M in which the data contained in the corresponding short block write command is to be stored, (d) modifying the respective block of size M after it is read with the data contained in the corresponding short block write command, and (e) generating a respective write operation for said internal queue, each said write operation writing the corresponding modified block of size M to its original location on a disk surface of said disk drive.