Various zone forwarding management techniques disclosed herein generally provide efficient methods of data caching, steering, mapping, and migration to reduce write amplification and command latency. In one implementation, a zone-forward storage medium management method includes receiving commands to write data sets to target LBAs included in a consecutive sequence of LBAs, selectively mapping the sequence of LBAs to a plurality of contiguous physical zones, and selectively writing the data sets to the physical zones. Various techniques may be used to migrate valid data of the plurality of physical zones to one physical zone.

A data storage space configuration of a hard disk drive comprises a plurality of zones in which each one of the plurality of zones stores customer data. The data storage space configuration further comprises a plurality of database metadata storage spaces allocated in the plurality of zones, wherein the number of database metadata storage spaces is less than or equal to the number of zones. The database metadata may comprise temporary metadata. The database metadata may comprise write-ahead log (WAL) metadata. The database metadata may comprise staged-write (DEPOT) metadata for the purpose of interrupted write recovery.

A storage system writes an object across zones of a set of zones (zone set). Each zone of a zone set is contributed from an independently accessible storage medium. To create a zone set, the storage system arbitrarily selects disks to contribute a zone for membership in the zone set. This results in a fairly even distribution of zone sets throughout the storage system, which increases fault tolerance of the storage system. Although disk selection for zone set membership is arbitrary, the arbitrary selection can be from a pool of disks that satisfy one or more criteria (e.g., health or activity based criteria). In addition, weights can be assigned to disks to influence the arbitrary selection. Although manipulating the arbitrary selection with weights or by reducing the pool of disks reduces the arbitrariness, this evenly distributes zone sets while accounting for client demand and/or disk health.

The present technology relates to an information processing device and method, a recording medium, and a program, which can improve a data transfer speed. In the recording medium, a recording area is divided into a plurality of simulated zones and a set of the plurality of simulated zones composes a simulated zone group. Then, an address is set to each area in the simulated zones so that the addresses are interleaved between the simulated zones composing the simulated zone group. By interleaving the addresses between the simulated zones in this manner, a local seek operation or a rotational delay can be reduced and the data transfer speed can be improved when recording or reproducing data to the recording medium in more than one channel at the same time. The present technology can be applied to an optical disk.

In one example, the disclosure is directed to a method comprising receiving, by a controller of a hard disk drive, a request to write a data block to a data storage platter of the hard disk drive. The data storage platter of the hard disk drive includes at least one random access zone and at least one sequential access zone. The controller determines a hinting value for the data block based on hinting information of the data block. The controller further determines, based at least in part on the hinting value, a location of the data storage platter of the hard disk at which to write the data block. The location includes one of the at least one random access zone or one of the at least one sequential access zone. The controller writes the data block at the location.

Various illustrative aspects are directed to a data storage device, method, and one or more processing devices that are configured to: maintain respective measures of write commands associated with respective ones of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) zones defined in a data storage device, wherein data associated with the write commands is stored in a write cache associated with the data storage device; select one of the SMR zones based on the respective measures; perform a pre-heat operation of a laser diode included in a head associated with the selected one of the SMR zones; and perform a continuous write operation in the selected one of the SMR zones following the pre-heat operation, wherein the continuous write operation writes at least a portion of data stored in the write cache associated with the selected one of the SMR zones.

A durable file system has been designed for storage devices that do not support write in place and/or that are susceptible to errors or failures. The durable file system also facilitates organization and access of large objects (e.g., gigabytes to terabytes in size). Since the write of a large object often involves multiple write operations, the writing is also referred to as ingesting. When ingesting an object, the durable file system writes the object with indexing information for the object to persistent storage across multiple zones that each map to an independently accessible storage medium (e.g., disks on different spindles). After persisting the indexing information with the object, the durable file system updates a file system index in working memory (e.g., non-volatile system memory) with the indexing information for the object.

Method and apparatus for positioning shingled magnetic recording (SMR) tracks on a rotatable data storage medium. In some embodiments, a first band of partially overlapping tracks is written the medium at a first track pitch. An adjacent, second band of partially overlapping tracks is written to the medium at the first track pitch. The second band has a first written track at a second track pitch with respect to a last written track in the first band. The second track pitch is determined in response to an error rate established for a test track using an adjacent track written at the first track pitch.

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.