STORAGE MEDIUM CONTROLLER

摘要

STORAGE MEDIUM CONTROLLER A dual mode disk controller is disclosed for use between a host processor 14 and its storage medium for controlling data transfer to and from the storage medium. The data is formatted on the medium in two distinct formats, one capable of bulk fast transfers useful in a swapping operation, and the other capable of periodic slower transfers as is acceptable for file retrieval. The disk controller is designed having a small fast buffer memory 106 for accepting information from the storage medium. File transfer data it transferred immediately without host CPU intervention, to a larger cache memory 107. The host CPU 14 accesses the fast buffer memory 106 periodically to retrieve swap transfer data while only accessing the larger cache memory when it needs to retrieve the file formatted information.