...that a workman who left the soap mixing machine on too long was responsible for making Ivory Soap? He was so embarrassed by his mistake that he threw the mess in a stream. Imagine his dismay when the evidence of his error floated to the surface! Result: Ivory soap, the soap that floats.
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| Number | Title | Issue Date |
| 7352525 | Hard disk drive fly height adjust method and apparatus during error recovery Data recovery, following a read error in a hard disk drive, is provided which includes an adjustment of fly height. In one embodiment, some re-reads are performed by both adjusting the fly height and the off-track positioning of the read head. In one embodiment, two... | 04/01/2008 |
| 7349172 | Certifying concentric data in eccentric servo data tracks of pre-formatted media Apparatus and method for rotating a data storage media having pre-formatted servo data tracks adjacent a data transfer member, and retrieving readback data with the data transfer member along a path that is non-concentric in relation to the servo data tracks. The da... | 03/25/2008 |
| 7349174 | Soft sensor for operating shock in a disc drive A method of preventing a write operation to a disc in a disc drive during a shock event without the use of a separate shock sensor comprises steps of monitoring an actuator voice coil motor (VCM) control plant output signal, generating an actuator voice coil motor (... | 03/25/2008 |
| 7349508 | Method for reconstructing data clocked at a symbol rate from a distorted analog signal A method and a device for reconstructing data, clocked at a symbol rate, from a signal which has been distorted by transmission of a transmission link, are disclosed. The method or respectively, the device, being predominantly performed or implemented, respectively,... | 03/25/2008 |
| 7345837 | Disk drive that refreshes data on portions of a disk based on a number of write operations thereto A disk drive includes a rotatable data storage disk, a transducer, an actuator, and a controller. The transducer is configured to read and write data on the disk. The actuator is configured to position the transducer relative to defined portions of the disk. The con... | 03/18/2008 |
| 7333281 | Method and apparatus to write and inspect servo information on a disc drive A method and an apparatus to write and inspect servo information on a disc drive and minimize an effect on servo information written in adjacent tracks caused by a gap erase field, and write servo information on the disc drive and perform servo information inspectio... | 02/19/2008 |
| 7334165 | Signal processing apparatus and a data recording and reproducing apparatus including local memory processor In a data recovery processing, the conventional overhead, primarily, latency due to a rotational recording media is removed. Secondary, in a signal processing or in a recording and reproducing apparatus, reliability of data reproduction is improved by repeatedly pro... | 02/19/2008 |
| 7333283 | Disk drive device with temperature and humidity control Embodiments of the invention provide a disk drive device excellent in reliability that can reduce influence of a temperature change in an environment of use. In one embodiment, a disk drive device includes a disk drive mechanism that records information in a disk or... | 02/19/2008 |
| 7330320 | Method and apparatus to limit DC-level in coded data In a perpendicular magnetic recording system, the data that is being written by the write channel is fed back into the read channel. The read channel processes the data and decides if the written sequence is likely to have very poor DC characteristics. If that is th... | 02/12/2008 |
| 7330321 | Reference magnetic signal recording device and method of manufacturing the same A method of simultaneously recording multiple reference magnetic signals by using a magnetic head having multiple recording portions is provided. A writing yoke formed of a ferromagnetic material thin film and a back yoke are provided to a side wall of a slider, whi... | 02/12/2008 |
| 7330324 | Magnetic disk drive having a function for using a thermal protrusion amount for flying height management and an inspection device having such a function A write head's material having a great thermal expansion coefficient expands due to Joule heat resulting from a write current and a temperature rise dependent on high-frequency core loss, thereby causing the head's flying surface to protrude toward a magnetic disk. ... | 02/12/2008 |
| 7331043 | Detecting and mitigating soft errors using duplicative instructions Software techniques are employed to mitigate soft errors. In particular, a compiler (or other executable code generator) may emit otherwise duplicative instructions targeting otherwise duplicative storage locations to facilitate run-time detection and, in some cases... | 02/12/2008 |
| 7327646 | Optical recording medium and method for formatting the same with improved compatability and consistency An optical recording medium and method of formatting the optical recording medium is disclosed. In the present invention, the location information of the supplementary spare area, if assigned, is reset when the optical recording medium is formatted. The resetting of... | 02/05/2008 |
| 7324598 | Apparatus and method to reduce quantization error An apparatus includes a quantizer to generate a quantized signal from an input signal and a function unit may be included to generate an output signal by applying a predetermined function to the quantized signal. The apparatus further may include a correction unit t... | 01/29/2008 |
| 7324294 | Magnetic recording disk drive with patterned media and circuit for generating timing pulses from the pattern A magnetic recording disk drive has a patterned magnetic recording disk with data blocks of magnetizable material separated by nonmagnetic regions, a read head for reading the magnetized data blocks and generating a readback signal, and a timing circuitry that gener... | 01/29/2008 |
| 7324301 | Striping data simultaneously across multiple platter surfaces A hard disk drive comprises an actuator with independently movable arms and a printed circuit board with custom core electronic architecture. The drive also comprises one or more platters aggregating two or more platter surfaces whereupon data may be read from or wr... | 01/29/2008 |
| 7321359 | Method and device for optical navigation An method and device suitable for navigation on a wide variety of surfaces is introduced. Specular reflection is used to determine relative motion over typical surfaces. A specific application is a computer mouse. ... | 01/22/2008 |
| 7321478 | Data transfer apparatus head cleaning A data transfer apparatus is described for transferring data between at least one transducer head of the data transfer apparatus and a data medium removably received in the data transfer apparatus. The data transfer apparatus is operable to monitor at least one data... | 01/22/2008 |
| 7321618 | PCM upstream data transmission server A method for designing an equalizer and tracking performance for upstream PCM in a digital communications network is described. The invention optimizes upstream data rate rates for data transmissions in a network between a client modem a server modem. During trainin... | 01/22/2008 |
| 7322003 | Information storage device A control unit transfers user data and an ECC that are read from a magnetic disk and stored in an FIFO to a data buffer. An erasure position movement control unit shifts an erasure start position from a predetermined initial value at predetermined intervals of erasu... | 01/22/2008 |
| 7317587 | Magnetic disk devices with data recording areas set separately for each device The present invention relates to a magnetic disk device and provides a magnetic disk device in which data recording areas are separately set based on the inner recording boundary or outer recording boundary of the head measured for each magnetic disk device. When th... | 01/08/2008 |
| 7317588 | Storage device, data-assurance control device, and data assurance method A data reading unit reads inner offset data from an offset reading in an inner direction toward a center of a storage medium and outer offset data from an offset reading in an outer direction toward a circumference of the storage medium. A data comparing unit compar... | 01/08/2008 |
| 7317586 | Methods and structure for general purpose interval accumulating filter for measuring operational parameters of a digital read channel Methods and structures for a general purpose, discrete time sample, interval accumulating filter for measuring any of a plurality of parameters associated with operation of a digital read channel. The general purpose interval accumulating features and aspects hereof... | 01/08/2008 |
| 7315496 | Memory manage method for defect management of an optical disk A method for accessing data of an optical disk with a disk drive. The drive includes a memory; the optical disk has a plurality of data blocks for recording data and a plurality of spare blocks for replacing defect data blocks. While reading data recorded on the opt... | 01/01/2008 |
| 7307887 | Continued verification in non-volatile memory write operations Temporary lock-out is provided while programming a group of non-volatile memory cells to more accurately program the memory cells. After successfully verifying that the threshold voltage of a memory cell has reached the level for its intended state, it is possible t... | 12/11/2007 |
| 7307809 | Correlation servo for positioning recording head Tape heads and controllers for controlling such heads in a tape drive are described. A controller may determine a first parameter corresponding to the similarity between data read by a first pair of read elements of a head, a second parameter corresponding to the si... | 12/11/2007 |
| 7304921 | Recording control device, recording control method, program and recording system To provide a recording control device able to control a data recording so as not to use a defective sector free from a sector test before a shipment thereof, which controls a data recording with respect to a plurality of sectors in a recording region of a recording ... | 12/04/2007 |
| 7302603 | Host-initiated data reconstruction for improved RAID read operations Method, system and computer program product are provided to improve the reliability of data transfers from RAID systems. Although some read errors may be detected by the RAID controller, other errors may not be; undetected errors may affect the integrity of the data... | 11/27/2007 |
| 7298568 | Systems and methods for using worf to identify burst patterns for repair The misplacement of a servo burst during a servowriting or self-servowriting process can be corrected by erasing and re-writing that burst. In addition, WORF information of a track can be saved in memory for future servowriting and/or can be utilized to compare with... | 11/20/2007 |
| 7296214 | Method and apparatus for concatenated channel coding with variable code rate and coding gain in a data transmission system A system with one or more base stations is described having an outer code encoder to generate an outer code based, at least in part, on a plurality of data elements using an (N,K) Reed-Solomon (RS) code over FG(2m). N represents the length of the RS code,... | 11/13/2007 |
| 7296209 | Apparatus for encoding and decoding A communication device which executes proper communications by correcting communication errors caused by noise generated on a transmission line or the like. An encoding device for adding error correction code to an input data sequence is provided with a first code e... | 11/13/2007 |
| 7296142 | Multi-tiered retry scheme for reading copies of information from a storage medium Minimal and maximal numbers are established defining two levels of retry attempts to read system information from a storage medium. Multiple copies of the system information are stored on the storage medium. Attempts are made to successively read the copies until ei... | 11/13/2007 |
| 7295502 | Optical desk apparatus An error pulse is generated from a PRML circuit, and reproduction compatibility with a conventional apparatus is established. After a reproducing signal output from an optical head is equalized by an analog equalizer, sampled by an A/D converter at every clock, and ... | 11/13/2007 |
| 7293223 | Method and apparatus for concatenated channel coding with variable code rate and coding gain in a data transmission system Methods and apparatuses of concatenated channel decoding data involving the decoding of soft-channel symbols using a parity-check to generate a plurality of m decoded data symbols according to an (m+1, m) parity check code, and decoding the plurality of m decoded bi... | 11/06/2007 |
| 7284164 | Method and apparatus for error correction of read data in a disk drive A disk drive comprising a read channel including a decoder and an EP unit, and a disk controller including an error correction unit is disclosed. The EP unit generates error positional information showing an error position among data output from the decoder. The dis... | 10/16/2007 |
| 7284072 | DMA engine for fetching words in reverse order Presented herein is a direct memory access engine for providing data words in the reverse order. The data words are fetched in batches comprising a predetermined number of data words starting from the last data word and proceeding to the first data word. The batches... | 10/16/2007 |
| 7280309 | Access performance adjusting method and storage apparatus An access performance adjusting method is adapted to a storage apparatus having a storage to prestore a skew quantity that is used to shift a data write starting position of each track of a recording medium depending on a head moving time required to move a head fro... | 10/09/2007 |
| 7281065 | Long latency interface protocol A system includes a read/write channel and a hard disk controller. The hard disk controller includes a latency-independent interface that communicates with the read/write channel. A serial control data circuit transmits a serial control data signal including serial ... | 10/09/2007 |
| 7281175 | Readout controlling apparatus, reproducing apparatus, recording apparatus, and readout controlling method A readout controlling apparatus for controlling reading conditions at the time of reading data coded in units of predetermined code blocks from a recording medium capable of performing error correction at a high reliability even when the playback conditions are poor... | 10/09/2007 |
| 7280293 | Multi-level mapping of tape error recoveries Method and apparatus are provided for presenting various levels of detail about successful error recoveries and background hardware optimizations during the recording and retrieval of digital information on magnetic tape. A first, Band Summary, report presents a hig... | 10/09/2007 |