Abstract: A disk drive has on-board soft error recovery procedures for recovering data following a soft error, and the capability to selectively disable or limit this feature. Preferably, a set of data storage devices are used to store heterogeneous data, i.e., to store some alphanumeric data, and some multimedia data. If a disk drive is selected for storage of multimedia data, the soft error recovery is disabled, and soft errors are simply transmitted to the host system as data. If each disk surface may be independently allocated to data of different types, soft error recovery may be independently disabled for each disk surface.

Abstract: A set of data storage devices are used to store heterogeneous data, i.e., to store some alphanumeric data, and some multimedia data. The internal operating parameters of the storage devices are monitored, and data is selectively stored by matching the type of data to the internal operating parameters of the storage devices. Preferably, the set of data storage devices is a RAID system containing multiple rotating magnetic disk drive storage devices. The system monitors the operating temperature, the soft error rate, the head flyheight, and the actuator performance of the drives in the system. A fuzzy logic classification system is used to generate a set of fuzzy classification scores evaluating each drive as most appropriate to one of three types of data: alphanumeric, graphics/sound, or video. A drive is selected for storing a type of data according to the fuzzy classification scores.

Abstract: A disk drive has on-board soft error recovery procedures for recovering data following a soft error, and the capability to selectively disable or limit this feature. Preferably, a set of data storage devices are used to store heterogeneous data, i.e., to store some alphanumeric data, and some multimedia data. If a disk drive is selected for storage of multimedia data, the soft error recovery is disabled, and soft errors are simply transmitted to the host system as data. If each disk surface may be independently allocated to data of different types, soft error recovery may be independently disabled for each disk surface.