DETAILED ACTION
This Office Action is based on application 19/324,801 filed 10 September 2025. Claims 1-20, as originally filed, are currently pending and have been fully considered below.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 10 September 2025 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Specification
The title of the invention is not descriptive. A new title is required that is clearly indicative of the invention to which the claims are directed.
Claim Objections
The following claims are objected to due to informalities:
Claims 12, 13, 16, and 17: The claims recite several instances of the words “its own”. The pronoun ‘its’ raises issues in terms of definiteness of the claims (e.g. What is ‘it’?). The pronoun needs to be replaced with the noun to which the pronoun references.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 1 (and similarly Claims 12 and 18) recites the limitation “the patrol process comprising reading of data from the first memory region and then writing of the read data into another memory region after error correction included in the read data”. The claim does not make grammatical sense. As presented, the term ‘error correction’ attempts to mean two different things: (1) an action performed before ‘writing of the read data’ and (2) data (or metadata) included in the read data. Is ‘error correction’ intended to be an event or data?
For prior art evaluation purposes, the limitation is interpreted as follows: “the patrol process comprising reading of data from the first memory region, error correcting the read data comprising creating error corrected read data by including error correction metadata in the read data, and writing the error corrected read data into another memory region”.
Claims in View of Prior Art
Prior art has not been found to anticipate or render obvious the claim elements of Claims 1-20 as a whole. However, the claims will be re-evaluated in view of prior art upon resolution of the outstanding indefiniteness rejection to the claims.
Prior art including ABUMI (US PGPub 2012/0210067) disclose a patrol (or scrubbing) command issued at a patrol interval, that when issued, performs a patrol process of accessing each item of data in a mirrored pair of memory including performing error detection and correction on the data (¶[0054]; ¶[0069]). Prior art including FUJITA et al (US PGPub 2014/0281337) discloses a storage system including first and second storage (Fig 1) including control units that manage allocated volumes as mirror volumes including use of a mirror volume index table that identifies a mirror volume by volume number including the number of mirrors (¶[0127]; Fig 9). However, the combination may not fairly disclose “upon receiving the mirroring information from the host via the host interface, set a patrol cycle for the first memory region with reference to a part of the patrol cycle information corresponding to the number of mirroring regions and the identifier indicated by the mirroring information from the host” as limited in Claim 1 (and similarly Claims 12 and 18).
The Office would like to emphasize that while one or more reasons are offered as to why the claims are allowable over the prior art, it is each claim, taken as a whole, including interrelationships and interconnections between various claimed elements which are allowable over the prior art of record and not any individual limitation of a claim.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure teach related patrolling/scrubbing processes in mirrored storage.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ERIC T LOONAN whose telephone number is (571)272-6994. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8am-5pm.
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/ERIC T LOONAN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2137
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