Western Digital and Skyera Assigned Patent

Western Digital Technologies, Inc., Irvine, CA, and Skyera, LLC, San Jose, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,286,176) developed by Tomlin, Andrew J., San Jose, CA, Jones, Justin, Burlingame, CA, Mullendore, Rodney N., San Jose, CA, and Danilak, Radoslav, Cupertino, CA, for a “selective skipping of blocks in an SSD ”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A solid state drive, SSD, includes: a plurality of solid state memory devices, each solid state memory device including a plurality of memory blocks arranged in a plurality of planes, a storage, and an SSD controller configured to: write data to memory blocks in a predefined sequence, detect a defective memory block in the plurality of solid state memory devices, mark the detected memory block as defective and store an address of a next non-defective memory block, and in response to data to be written to the marked memory block, the controller skips the marked memory block and writes the data to the next non-marked memory block.“

The patent application was filed on January 15, 2014 (14/156,354).