Patent ID: 6993624

Claim:
A rotating magnetic disk drive data storage device, comprising: a disk drive base; a rotatably mounted disk and spindle assembly, said disk and spindle assembly comprising at least one rigid disk for recording magnetically encoded data on at least one surface of said at least one rigid disk; a movable actuator supporting at least one transducer head, said actuator positioning said at least one transducer head to access said magnetically encoded data on said at least one surface of said at least one rigid disk; a controller for controlling the operation of said disk drive data storage device, said controller maintaining a queue of data access operations and selecting operations for execution from said queue according to an estimated access time of the respective operations, said controller accessing a seek profile table and an index table, said seek profile table containing a plurality of entries, each entry corresponding to a respective seek profile, and said index table containing a plurality of entries, each entry corresponding to a respective set of access operation parameter values and containing a value indexing an entry in said seek profile table corresponding to said respective set of access operation parameter values; wherein said controller estimates said access time of a data access operation by: (a) accessing the index table entry corresponding to the respective set of access operation parameter values, (b) using the value of the index entry to determine the corresponding seek profile table entry, and (c) using the corresponding seek profile table entry to estimate the access time.