Patent attributes
Technology is disclosed herein for efficient use of volatile memory that is used for accumulating parity data of user data being written to non-volatile memory cells. A memory controller may replace primary parity in a first portion of a parity buffer with data other than primary parity while a second portion of the buffer is still being used to store the primary parity. Therefore, the memory controller smartly re-uses the parity buffer, which makes efficient use of the volatile memory. In one aspect, a memory controller accumulates secondary parity for the user data in a first portion of the parity buffer while a second portion of the parity buffer is still being used to store the primary parity. The memory controller may compute the secondary parity from present content of the first portion of the parity buffer and primary parity presently stored in the second portion of the buffer.
