Abstract: A system for use in an aerospace environment includes an array of storage drives each comprising a non-radiation-hardened drive controller, a non-radiation-hardened, non-volatile, storage medium, and a non-radiation-hardened volatile memory. The system includes a radiation-tolerant storage controller coupled to the array. The storage controller provides failure-resistant data redundancy among the storage drives of the array. The system includes a bus host that accesses the array via the storage controller. The storage controller implements security logic and a root-of-trust that provides to the bus host verification of authenticity of the radiation tolerant storage controller and the storage drives.

Abstract: A failure of a head is detected, the head reading from and writing to an affected surface of a disk of a disk drive. The failure prevents the head from writing to the affected surface but does not prevent the head from reading from the affected surface. In response to detecting the failure, a remediation is performed. The remediation involves determining spare capacity blocks on other surfaces of the disk drive different than the affected surface, and copying data from the affected surface to the spare capacity blocks via an internal copy function within the disk drive. The spare capacity blocks in place of the affected surface for data storage and retrieval subsequent to the failure.

Abstract: Described are data processing and storage systems, and methods for use therewith, that make use of a host memory buffer (HMB) partition of one or more host devices to directly cache at-risk data from one or more HMB-aware hard disk drives (HDDs) via remote direct memory access over nonvolatile memory express interfaces and protocols.

Abstract: A data storage system for use in a high radiation environment includes an array of storage drives. Each of the storage drives includes a non-radiation-hardened drive controller, a non-radiation-hardened non-volatile storage medium, and a non-radiation-hardened volatile memory. A radiation-hardened storage controller is coupled to the array, the radiation-hardened storage controller provides host access to the array. One or more compute cores are configured to locally perform at least one operation on data stored on one or both of the non-volatile storage medium and the volatile memory based on a computational storage function received from the host.

Abstract: Disclosed are systems and methods for reducing the amount of time required before resuming full data operations after a hard disk drive has been spun down and/or placed in a standby mode. Such systems and methods may make use of thresholds to changes in environmental parameters, such as temperature, that may affect hard disk drive calibrations. Environmental parameter changes below a threshold may allow a subset of calibrations to be skipped or otherwise reduced to resume data operations. In addition or alternatively, a hard disk drive may be placed in a read-only mode prior to performing all calibrations needed to resume full write operations.

Abstract: The described technology provides implementations of a mechanical magnetoresistance device. The mechanical magnetoresistance device includes a first magnetoresistive well, the magnetoresistive well including at least one magnetic element and a suspension substrate, wherein the at least one magnetic element is suspended in the suspension substrate. The mechanical magnetoresistance device further includes a first conductive element in electronic communication with a first portion of the first magnetoresistive well, a second conductive element in electronic communication with a different second portion of the first magnetoresistive well, wherein the first conductive element is in electronic communication with the second conductive element via the first magnetoresistive well.

Abstract: Described are systems and methods for performing read after write operations in multi-revolution hard disk drives, which involve comparing the results of a read after write operation to a conditioned version of the write data that is retained in buffer memory. By conditioning the write data, a synthetic read-back signal can be fashioned that emulates the signal produced when reading the magnetic disk. Such an emulated read-back signal can be directly compared to the signal read from the magnetic disk by correlation and threshold checking, or the emulated read-back signal can be combined with the read-back signal and then compared against the write data residing in the buffer memory in a data verification operation. The data verification may be qualitative so that error codes may be developed and stored.

Abstract: Described are data processing and storage systems, and methods for use therewith, that make use of a host memory buffer (HMB) partition of one or more host devices to directly cache at-risk data from one or more HMB-aware hard disk drives (HDDs) via remote direct memory access over nonvolatile memory express interfaces and protocols.

Abstract: An apparatus may include a memory device, a memory controller, or both that can communicate via memory standard interfaces. However, the memory device may have physical memory that does not comply with the memory standard by itself. Disclosed herein are solutions that allow various non-standard types of memory, or emerging memory, to be utilized via a host, microprocessor, or memory controller that implements the interface standard. For example, by utilizing a command converter at the microprocessor and a tunneling register at the memory device, a microprocessor can send commands to the memory device by writing them to the tunneling register, which can then be processed at the memory device for operations to be performed with the non-standard or emerging memory.

Abstract: The technology disclosed herein provides a method of sharing a memory appliance memory between multiple devices, the method including scanning by a host device, at host boot up, a plurality of memory devices to determine if one of the plurality of devices is a compatible memory device, reconfiguring the compatible memory device as offline system memory, receiving from the compatible memory device an indication of an amount of shared memory available on the compatible memory device, and labeling each block of a plurality of memory blocks on the compatible storage device as offline within a host memory map on the host device.

Abstract: The technology disclosed herein provides a method including determining a location of a storage device in a storage enclosure, based on the location of a storage device in a storage enclosure, determining environmental associated with the location of the storage device, determining achievable capacity of the storage device based on the environmental parameters associated with the location of the storage device, and formatting the storage device based on the determined achievable capacity.

Abstract: Disclosed are hard disk drives (HDDs), and methods for use therewith, that utilize reduced overhead servo fields, thereby simplifying the servo system. Reduced overhead servo fields may be of particular use in HDDs that utilize multi-revolution storage techniques to store data at much higher densities than what is possible for conventional HDDs. The relaxed performance requirements of high-density, multi-revolution drives provides opportunities for reducing servo overhead, thereby potentially further increasing the areal density capability of the magnetic media. Servo overhead may also be reduced by placing certain servo data on flash or other memory off of the media disk rather than in the servo fields written to the media disk.

Abstract: Disclosed are hard disk drives (HDDs), and methods for use therewith, that utilize reduced overhead servo fields, thereby simplifying the servo system. Reduced overhead servo fields may be of particular use in HDDs that utilize multi-revolution storage techniques to store data at much higher densities than what is possible for conventional HDDs. The relaxed performance requirements of high-density, multi-revolution drives provides opportunities for reducing servo overhead, thereby potentially further increasing the areal density capability of the magnetic media. Servo overhead may also be reduced by placing certain servo data on flash or other memory off of the media disk rather than in the servo fields written to the media disk.

Abstract: A data storage apparatus is presented that includes a well structure comprising a suspension medium, and a magnetic particle disposed in at least a portion of the well structure. A control system is configured to represent a data state corresponding to a positioning of the magnetic particle within the well structure, the magnetic particle moved responsive to an applied field and a present material state of the well structure. Various addressable arrays of well structures and associated control elements can be established to form data storage devices.

Abstract: A processor may determine, for each subdevice of a set of subdevices of a storage enclosure device, one or more operational measures of the subdevice. A processor may determine, based at least on the one or more operational measures for the subdevices and one or more environmental characteristics associated with the subdevices, a set of striping groups that optimizes an operational measure of the set of subdevices of the storage enclosure device, each striping group including a respective subset of the set of subdevices. A processor may store output data of a data striping operation to a particular subset of subdevices associated with a particular striping group of the set of striping groups.

Abstract: A data storage apparatus is presented that includes a well structure comprising a suspension medium, and a magnetic particle disposed in at least a portion of the well structure. A control system is configured to represent a data state corresponding to a positioning of the magnetic particle within the well structure, the magnetic particle moved responsive to an applied field and a present material state of the well structure. Various addressable arrays of well structures and associated control elements can be established to form data storage devices.

Abstract: Described are data storage systems and methods in which data ingested by a hard disk drive (HDD) may be first stored in a designated intake zone of the HDD magnetic media using conventional performance parameters and recording techniques, and thereafter compacted and moved to a designated high-density zone on the magnetic media. The compacted data is stored at higher data storage densities than what is convention, and at lower performance parameters, and thus the moving of compacted data to the high-density zone may be done opportunistically in the background. The intake zone and high-density zone may be statically designated or dynamically defined based on HDD performance requirements, usage characteristics, available media capacity, and so forth.

Abstract: The technology disclosed herein provides a memory blade including a plurality of fabric switches configured to receive commands from a plurality of host clients, an address decoder and tracker circuit communicatively connected to the fabric switches and configured to determine the source of commands received at the fabric switches an aggregator crossbar configured to provide bandwidth aggregation between host clients and a plurality of memory modules; and a buffer module configured to couple the commands from the plurality of host clients with the plurality of memory modules.

Abstract: A processor may determine, for each subdevice of a set of subdevices of a storage enclosure device, one or more reliability measures of the subdevice. A processor may determine, based at least on the one or more reliability measures for the subdevices and a spatial layout rule, a set of striping groups that maximizes a reliability of the set of subdevices of the storage enclosure device, each of the striping groups including a respective subset of the set of subdevices, wherein the spatial layout rule prescribes a geometric layout of the subdevices within striping groups across the storage enclosure device. A processor may store output data of a data striping operation to a particular subset of subdevices associated with a particular striping group of the set of striping groups.

Abstract: Method and apparatus for managing a front-end cache formed of ferroelectric memory element (FME) cells. Prior to storage of writeback data associated with a pending write command from a client device, an intelligent cache manager circuit forwards a first status value indicative that sufficient capacity is available in the front-end cache for the writeback data. Non-requested speculative readback data previously transferred to the front-end cache from the main NVM memory store may be jettisoned to accommodate the writeback data. A second status value may be supplied to the client device if insufficient capacity is available to store the writeback data in the front-end cache, and a different, non-FME based cache may be used in such case. Mode select inputs can be supplied by the client device specify a particular quality of service level for the front-end cache, enabling selection of suitable writeback and speculative readback data processing strategies.