US Patent 9779035 Log-based data storage on sequentially written media

Techniques for implementing a log-based storage scheme upon data storage devices are described herein. A data storage device is initialized by writing an identifying record. For each portion of data to be written to the drive, a first record including information regarding the anticipated nature of the portion of data is written prior to the data. The data is then written as a second record that includes at least the raw data as well as integrity verification information. A third record is stored following the second record, and includes an accounting and/or index of the data successfully written in the second record. On sequentially written devices, the information in the first stored record may be used to locate the third record, which in turn may be used to record data in the second record as well as the location of a first record of another portion of data.