| 摘要 |
A disk controller (20) includes a controller processor (22) and a controller memory (24) having a plurality of memory locations with predetermined ones of the memory locations reserved for direct access by a host processor. With this particular arrangement, a disk controller (20) having a host accessible solid state memory at a much lower cost than a solid state disk is provided. The reserved memory locations of the controller memory may be referred to as a RAMDISK (26) which is configured such that it appears to the host processor as a solid state disk drive having a relatively small storage capacity. All read/write requests issued by the host processor and directed to the RAMDISK (26) are thus satisfied via reserved memory regions within a solid state controller memory (24) provided as part of a disk controller (20). Thus, the host processor need not read data from, or write data to, magnetic media such as a magnetic disk (28, 28a, 28n) drive memory or a magnetic tape memory. The net effect of providing a system having a RAMDISK (26) is similar to providing a disk storage system having a cache memory which operates with a one hundred percent cache hit rate on both read and write operations. The RAMDISK (26) may be provided as a software-selectable option within the disk controller (20), and, when enabled, the controller memory locations reserved for use as a RAMDISK (26) are allocated from available memory locations in the controller memory (24) identified from a poll memory available to the disk controller.
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