Connie H Lin

58840931, Mar 16, 1999

Aug 7, 1995

8/512860

Leo P. Berenguel - Fremont CA
James E. Korpi - Santa Clara CA
Connie Lin - Pleasanton CA

Rock Solid Systems, Inc. - Fremont CA

G06F 1300
G06F 1208

395821

A controller system for a CD-ROM drive or other slow access device such as a magneto-optical device using a conventional hard disk drive as a cache memory. In some embodiments, the hard disk cache is partitioned to use a portion thereof to clone the most often used data blocks on the CD-ROM disk such as the directory/file allocation table, while the balance of the hard disk is used to cache some or all of the balance of the CD-ROM disk using conventional cache memory least recently used rules. Three bus controllers for the host computer, CD-ROM drive and the hard disk cache are controlled by a microprocessor which runs a control program that implements the cloning and cache rules. The three bus controllers are connected by a DMA bus for faster transfer of data. The microprocessor controls the directions of the DMA transfers by data written to a control register.