Hitachi Assigned Patent

Hitachi Ltd.www.hitachi.com, Tokyo, has been assigned a patent (8,166,232) developed by Tomohiro Kawaguchi, Cupertino, CA, for "metrics and management for flash memory storage life."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Embodiments of the invention provide a method and a system for the management of availability and reliability of flash memory media. In one embodiment, a method of evaluating reliability of flash memory media comprises measuring a flash memory remaining life for each disk of a plurality of flash memory media disks provided in one or more flash memory media groups each of which has a configuration, wherein each flash memory media group is one of a RAID group or a thin provisioning pool; obtaining a ratio of sequential to random write I/O types for each flash memory media group; and calculating a remaining life of each flash memory media group based on the measured flash memory remaining life for each disk in said each flash memory media group, the configuration of said each flash memory media group, and the ratio of sequential to random write I/O types for said each flash memory media group."

The patent application was filed on April 2, 2009 (12/385,232).