A method for prioritized erasure of a non-volatile storage device, the
method including the steps of: providing at least one flash unit of the
storage device, wherein each flash unit has a plurality of blocks;
writing data into the plurality of blocks; assigning an erasure-priority
to each block, wherein the erasure-priority correlates with an
erasure-priority of the data; and erasing the data in each block
according to the erasure-priority of each block upon receiving an
emergency-erase command. Preferably, the step of writing data into the
plurality of blocks is performed in an arbitrary order in a first flash
unit, and the step of writing into subsequent flash units is performed in
correlation with the order in the first flash unit. Preferably, the step
of erasing includes aborting erasure, before completing the erasure, for
at least some of the plurality of blocks.