Patent ID: 7281086

Claim:
A method of managing the queuing of storage requests to a disk drive, the storage requests being divided into high-priority requests and low-priority requests, the high-priority requests generally requiring low response time and the low-priority requests generally requiring high throughput, the method comprising: placing each low-priority request on a low-priority request queue, the low-priority request queue being the subject of throughput optimization by which requests on the low-priority request queue are executed by the disk drive in a throughput-optimizing order generally different from the order in which the requests are placed on the low-priority request queue; when a high-priority request limit has not been reached, placing a high-priority request on a high-priority request queue, the high-priority request queue being the subject of priority selection such that requests on the high-priority request queue are executed by the disk drive ahead of requests on the low-priority request queue; and when the high-priority request limit has been reached, placing the high-priority request on the low-priority request queue such that the high-priority request is included in the throughput optimization along with the low-priority requests on the request queue.