sTec (WD) Assigned Patent

sTec Inc. (WD), Santa Ana, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,572,308) developed by four co-inventors for “supporting variable sector sizes in flash storage devices.”

The co-inventors are Mark Moshayedi, Newport Coast, CA, William Calvert, Cranleigh, England, Stephen Russell Boorman, Bookham, England, and Simon Mark Haynes, Send, England.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A flash storage device comprises a plurality of data blocks, each data block comprising a plurality of data segments, a system memory, and a controller. The controller is configured to cache in the system memory a plurality of data sectors to be written, to write to a first one of the plurality of data segments a first one of the plurality of data sectors, to write to the first one of the plurality of data segments a first portion of a second one of the plurality of data sectors, and to write to a second one of the plurality of data segments a second portion of the second one of the plurality of data sectors.“

The patent application was filed on June 25, 2009 (12/492,103).