Patent ID: 8437098

Claim:
A method, comprising: accessing a disk drive having a housing including at least one disk platter having at least one recordable disk surface having an areal density of at least 200 gigabits per square inch, wherein either a diameter of the at least one disk platter is greater than 3.5 inches or the at least one disk platter rotates at less than 5400 RPMs; controlling a movement of a read/write head with respect to the at least one disk platter to read and write tracks of data with respect to the at least one disk surface; caching, with a disk controller, in a non-volatile storage device modified tracks from write requests to write to the at least one disk surface on the at least one disk platter; and caching modified tracks in the non-volatile storage device to later destage to the at least one disk surface, wherein the at least one disk platter, the read/write head, the non-volatile storage device, and the disk controller are within the housing.