LSI Assigned Patent

LSI Corp., Milpitas, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,166,233) developed by Mark R. Schibilla, Rochester, MN, and Randy J. Reiter, Rochester, MN, for a "garbage collection for solid state disks."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Described embodiments provide a method of recovering storage space on a solid state disk (SSD). An index and valid page count are determined for each block of a segment of an SSD. If the valid page count of at least one block in the segment is zero, a quick clean is performed. A quick clean deallocates blocks having zero valid pages and places them in a queue for erasure. Otherwise, a deep clean is performed. A deep clean determines a compaction ratio, N-M, wherein N is a number of partially valid blocks and M is a number of free blocks required to compact the valid data from the N partially valid blocks into M entirely valid blocks. At least one data structure of the SSD is modified to refer to the M entirely valid blocks, and the N partially valid blocks are placed in the queue for erasure."

The patent application was filed on July 24, 2009 (12/508,879).