Importance

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Abstract

A method and system for reducing the time for initializing a non-volatile memory device, such as flash memory, at power-up that takes advantage of the fact that many file systems are designed to perform sequential writes within a block of data units. The method and system includes, in one aspect, reading the last page of a block, determining the logical sector number of the page and generating a mapping table for that block by allocating the logical sector number to the last page and respectively allocating to each remaining page sequentially decreasing logical sector numbers. When not all sectors in the block are consecutive, mapping table information is built by reading only one page from each chain of consecutive sectors. In another aspect, a 'deleted sector(s) present' flag is used in the last page of each block to determine whether the block contains deleted sectors, in which case the initialization procedure generally reads all sectors in the block. In addition, the initialization procedure reduces the time required to identify erased blocks by reading only the first and last pages of the block.

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First Claim