Patent ID: 6845405

Claim:
A disk drive comprising: (a) a disk comprising a plurality of concentric tracks, each track comprising a plurality of data sectors; (b) a head actuated radially over the disk; (c) an input/output queue for storing disk commands associated with host commands received from a host computer; (d) a disk controller for executing the disk commands stored in the input/output queue in an order determined from a rotational positioning optimization (RPO) algorithm, the disk controller for performing the steps of: linking together first disk command and a second disk command stored in the input/output queue to generate a linked disk command if the first and second disk commands access near sequential data sectors; computing an access latency for the linked disk command and at least one other disk command in the command queue, wherein the access latency for the linked disk command is computed as an access latency for the first disk command without computing an access latency for the second disk command; selecting a current disk command from the input/output queue according to the access latencies, the current disk command identifying a plurality of target data sectors; seeking the head to a first target track comprising the target data sectors; and if an error occurs while executing the current disk command and the current disk command is the linked disk command: executing at least one of the disk commands of the linked disk command by accessing at least one of the target data sectors; and inserting at least one of the unexecuted disk commands of the linked disk command into the input/output queue.