System and method for enhancing external storage

• US 20070162626A1
• Filed: 06/30/2006
• Published: 07/12/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 11/02/2005
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Technology Properties Limited LLC
• Original Assignee: Technology Properties Limited LLC
• Inventors: Iyer, Sree M., Venkidu, Arockiyaswamy, Jones, Larry L.
• Application Number:
  US11/478,895
• Publication Number:
  US 20070162626A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 710/8
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0607 by facilitating the process of upgrading existing storage systems, e.g. for improving compatibility between host and storage device
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0626 Reducing size or complexity of storage systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0632 by initialisation or re-initialisation of storage systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0689 Disk arrays, e.g. RAID, JBOD

Abstract

One embodiment as described herein provides a system and method for enhancing external storage. One embodiment includes a controller of a peripheral device of a computer system. The controller provides access a storage medium of the peripheral device. In one embodiment, the storage medium of the peripheral device includes a section of storage reserved for firmware of the peripheral device.

Claims

1. ) Apparatus comprising:

A controller of a peripheral device of a computer system, the controller to access a storage medium of the peripheral device, the storage medium of the peripheral device to include a section of storage reserved for firmware of the peripheral device.

2. ) The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the controller is exclusive of a non-volatile storage to store the device firmware.

3. ) The apparatus of claim 2, the device firmware to include at least one or more of a serial number of the device, an identity of a manufacturer of the device, and a model identity of the device.

4. ) The apparatus of claim 3, the peripheral device is an external storage solution.

5. ) The apparatus of claim 3, the peripheral device is an external storage device comprising one of a Universal Serial Bus (USB) disk drive, a Firewire disk drive, and a IDE disk drive.

6. ) The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the peripheral device has a host interface comprising at least one of USB interface, a serial ATA interface, a Firewire (IEEE 1394 interface), a USB on-the-go (OTG) attached to an ATA disk drive.

7. ) The apparatus of claim 5, wherein the controller to scan a primary storage medium for the device for firmware and to load the firmware into a memory of the system.

8. ) An apparatus comprising:

A controller to access a peripheral device, the controller exclusive of firmware, the controller to access a section of a storage medium of the peripheral device reserved to emulate firmware of the controller.

10. ) The apparatus of claim 8, wherein the controller is to provide logical access to the multiple HDDs as a single HDD having a storage capacity equal to a sum of the storage capacity of the multiple HDDs.

11. ) The apparatus of claim 8, wherein the controller, in response to an initiation, determines if one of a jumper and an indicator are set to indicate the multiple HDDs are to be accessed as a logical single HDD.

12. ) The apparatus of claim 10, wherein the controller is to determine a storage capacity of the separate HDDs of the multiple HDDs.

13. ) The apparatus of claim 10, in response to receiving an access request having an logical address greater than a quantity of addresses for a first HDD of the multiple HDDs, the controller to an address on a second HDD corresponding to the logical address by offsetting the logical address by the quantity of addresses for the first HDD.

9. ) Apparatus comprising:

A controller of a peripheral storage device of a computer system, the controller to identify a presence of multiple hard disk drives (HDDs) and provide logical access to the multiple HDDs as a single HDD having a storage capacity greater than a storage capacity of any one of the multiple HDDs.