Appeal No. 1999-0264
Application No. 08/573,582
capability that is "useful in a system that performs erased
sector management where sectors are pre-erased during times of
low user activity, thus enabling better write transfer rates."
We presume that the better write transfer rates contemplated
by Saldanha result from the fact that overwriting MO media
takes more time than initial writes to MO media. This
disadvantage is not shared by tape drives, such as disclosed
in Nakajima, or hard disk drives, such as the instant
invention; thus, the person having ordinary skill in the art
would not have been led by Saldanha's expressed improvement in
write transfer rates to make the proposed combination. The
Examiner cites (column 3, lines 7-9) of Kobayashi as further
motivation to make the proposed combination: Kobayashi
discloses here "a write operation control method capable of
writing information efficiently in a rotating type recording
medium." Assuming arguendo that Kobayashi's use of a
microprocessor to interrogate whether an incoming write
instruction is an initial write or an update write, and to
inhibit data recording when an initial write is requested in a
data field that has previously been written, promotes the
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