PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15744671
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-01
Publication Date: 2018-07
Patent Classification: ["365", "185290"]

Abstract:
A storage system according to one aspect of the present invention includes a plurality of storage devices using flash memory as a storage medium. The flash memory used for the storage device may include flash memory configured to operate each cell as a cell capable of storing n-bit information or a cell capable of storing m-bit information (where n<m). The storage system may periodically acquire a number of remaining erasures form the storage device and predict the lifetime of the storage device by using the acquired number of remaining erasures and the storage device operation time. If the predicted lifetime is greater than a predetermined value (service life) a predetermined number of cells may be changed to cells capable of storing m-bit information.

Claim (Index 1):
A storage system comprising:\n a storage controller and a plurality of storage devices connected to the storage controller; the plurality of storage devices including:\n a device controller, and \n a nonvolatile storage medium having a plurality of blocks as data erase units, the plurality of blocks including a plurality of cells, \n wherein\n each block of the plurality of blocks is configured to change the cells in the block from a state of operating in a first mode capable of storing n-bit information to a second node capable of storing m-bit information (n<m); \n the device controller is configured to:\n manage a number of remaining erasures for each block; \n reduce, when a mode of the block is changed from the first mode to the second mode, the number of remaining erasures of the block; and \n \n the storage controller is configured to:\n acquire, from the plurality of storage devices, the number of remaining erasures of the plurality of storage devices, \n calculate a rate of change of the number of remaining erasures of the plurality of storage devices, \n calculate, using the rate of change of the number of remaining erasures of the plurality of storage devices, a predicted lifetime value for the plurality of storage devices, and \n increase, when the predicted lifetime value is greater than a target lifetime, a storage capacity of the plurality of storage devices by changing the mode of a predetermined number of the blocks operating in the first mode to the second mode.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 7.0
- Percentile: 86.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.95588
- Patent Class: 365.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['16330881', '13125618', '14673913', '14569923', '14615109']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.7412409956529086
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5268240635983801
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.7197993024474557
- Mean Citation Score: 199.002322
- Max Citation Score: 355.5576
- Similarity Product: 329.2570820533276

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 0
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test