SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR LOGICAL REMOVAL OF PHYSICAL HEADS IN A HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD)

摘要

A hard disk drive (HDD) provides for the logical removal of defective physical heads. The HDD includes one or more disks organized into a plurality of regions, each region having a plurality of physical block addresses (PBAs). A number of physical heads are used to read and write information to the disks. A controller is configured to translate logical block addresses (LBAs) received from an external system to PBAs used to access the one or more disks, wherein the controller is configured to logically remove a defective physical head from service by dynamically re-assigning LBAs to each of the plurality of regions while preventing LBAs from being assigned to regions associated with the defective physical head.

主权项

1. A method of logically removing a defective physical head from service in a hard disk drive (HDD) system, the method comprising:
a. selecting a current region from a region array; b. determining whether the current region is associated with the defective physical head; wherein if the current region is not associated with the defective physical head then: c. assigning next available logical block address (LBA) range to the current region by updating the region array; d. updating a region chain of a previous region assigned an LBA range in the region array with the location of the current region; and e. incrementing the current region and repeating steps a.)-d.) for all available regions.