Imation Assigned Patent

Imation Corp., Oakdale, MN, has been assigned a patent (8,171,244) developed by Matthew D. Bondurant, Superior, CO, Mark Payne, Longmont, CO, and S. Christopher Alaimo, Boulder, CO, for "methods for implementation of worm mode on a removable disk drive storage system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Embodiments provide systems and methods for maintaining immutable data in an archiving system using random access memory. To ensure data is immutable, novel pointers are maintained in the hardware/firmware of the drive ports and on the removable disk drives. For example, a hardware/firmware in a modular drive bay maintains a pointer to a memory address in the removable disk drive memory that cannot write to a memory block that precedes the pointer. Data may only be stored after the pointer in the removable disk drive. As such, once data is written to the removable disk drive, the data cannot be overwritten although the removable disk drive employs random access memory."

The patent application was filed on Feb. 1, 2008 (12/024,582).