US Patent 7516267 Recovering from a non-volatile memory failure

Write operations store data in different physical memory locations. Each of the physical memory locations are associated with a logical address that is shared in common among the physical addresses. Sequence information stored in the physical memory location indicates which one of the write operations occurred last. The available erased memory location can be split into a list of erased memory locations available to be used and a list of erased memory locations not available to be used. Then, on a failure, only the list of erased memory locations available to be used needs to be analyzed to reconstruct the consumption states of memory locations.