Patent 7460442 was granted and assigned to Sony on December, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An optical disk apparatus for controlling two optical pickups in an optimized way in response to operation modes for rotating the optical disk. When receiving a request for seeking one optical pickup from a HOST, a CPU judges whether to move the other optical pickup synchronously to satisfy positional restriction of the two optical pickups. Furthermore, when operating one optical pickup upon, for example, a read request. from the HOST, the CPU judges whether to move the other pickup to follow.