METHODS OF STORING DATA IN STORAGE MEDIA, DATA STORAGE DEVICES USING THE SAME, AND SYSTEMS INCLUDING THE SAME

• US 20110252183A1
• Filed: 04/07/2011
• Published: 10/13/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 04/09/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
• Original Assignee: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
• Inventors: YOON, Chanho, SON, Hong Rak, CHO, Hee Chang, KONG, Junjin, CHO, Kyoung Lae, YU, Bumseok
• Granted Patent: US 8,738,838 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 711/102
• CPC Class Codes: G11C 16/349 Arrangements for evaluating degradation, retention or wearout, e.g. by counting erase cycles
• CPC Class Codes: H03M 7/30 Compression speech analysis-synthesis for redundancy reduction G10L19/00; for image communication H04N; Expansion; Suppression of unnecessary data, e.g. redundancy reduction

Abstract

A method of storing data in a storage media can include determining whether a size of data to be stored in the storage media satisfies a reference condition and compressing the data to provide compressed data for storage in the storage media upon determining that the size satisfies a reference condition.

Claims

1. A method of storing data in a storage media, comprising:

determining whether a size of data to be stored in the storage media satisfies a reference condition; and

compressing the data to provide compressed data for storage in the storage media upon determining that the size satisfies a reference condition.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein compressing comprises compressing the data to provide the compressed data upon determining that a non-zero remainder is generated upon dividing the size of the data by a physical storage unit wherein the remainder is less than a reference size.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the reference size comprises less than 50% of the physical storage unit.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein the storage media comprises at least one non-volatile memory, and the physical storage unit is selected from a group consisting of a sector, a page, a block, a super-block, and a plurality of blocks of the non-volatile memory.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

storing the data uncompressed in the storage media when the size of the data is determined not to satisfy the reference condition.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein compressing the data comprises compressing all the data to be stored in the storage media or only compressing the data to be stored in a last block among data to be stored in the storage media.

7. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

determining whether the data to be stored in the storage media is compressed data; and

storing the compressed data in the storage media without further compression.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein determining whether the data to be stored in the storage media is compressed data comprises:

determining whether the data to be stored in the storage media is compressed data prior to determining whether the size of data to be stored in the storage media satisfies the reference condition.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

comparing a time needed to compress the data to a time needed to perform write and read operations to determine whether the time taken to compress data is greater than a predetermined ratio, wherein data is stored in the storage media without data compression when the time taken to compress data is greater than the predetermined ratio.

10. A data storage device comprising:

a storage media; and

a controller configured to selectively compress data for storage in the storage media based on whether a size of the data to be stored in the storage media satisfies a reference condition.

11. The data storage device of claim 10, wherein the controller comprises:

CPU;

a buffer operating responsive to the control of the CPU and configured to store the data; and

a compression/decompression block operating responsive to the control of the CPU to compress or decompress the data in the buffer.

12. The data storage device of claim 11, wherein a memory translation layer operated by the CPU is configured to determine whether a non-zero remainder is generated upon dividing a physical storage unit by the size of the data and the remainder is less than a reference size.

13. The data storage device of claim 12, wherein the reference size comprises less than 50% of the physical storage unit.

14. The data storage device of claim 12, wherein the storage media comprises at least one non-volatile memory, and the physical storage unit is selected from a group consisting of a sector, a page, a block, a super-block, and a plurality of blocks of the non-volatile memory.

15. The data storage device of claim 11, further comprising:

a memory translation layer operated by the CPU configured to determine whether the data to be stored in the storage media is compressed data prior to determining whether the size of data to be stored in the storage media satisfies the reference condition.

16. The data storage device of claim 15, wherein when the data to be stored in the storage media is compressed data, the data is stored in the storage media without further data compression.

17. A system comprising:

a plurality of solid state drives, wherein each of the plurality of solid state drives comprises a storage media and

a controller configured to selectively compress data for storage in the storage media based on whether a size of the data to be stored in the storage media satisfies a reference condition.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein the controller comprises a memory translation layer configured to determine whether a non-zero remainder is generated upon dividing a physical storage unit by the size of the data and the remainder is less than a reference size.

19. The system of claim 18, wherein the storage media comprises at least one non-volatile memory, and the physical storage unit is selected from a group consisting of a sector, a page, a block, a super-block, and a plurality of blocks of the non-volatile memory.

20. The system of claim 17, further comprising a server for providing a server function.