US Patent 7487290 Disk drive having real time performance improvement

Where realtime performance-critical processing is executed in parallel with data integrity-critical processing, embodiments of the invention improve the realtime performance by raising the data transfer efficiency for sequential access-dominant realtime processing. In one embodiment, if a non-realtime processing command is received while read-ahead is in progress for a realtime processing command, processing of the non-realtime processing command is not started until a certain amount of data is cached. In addition, in order to prevent the periodicity disturbance of realtime processing, when the processing of the non-realtime processing command is postponed, the read-ahead is continued maximally until the timestamp at which the next realtime processing command is expected to be issued.