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Data redundancy and recovery protection

  • US 5,101,492 A
  • Filed: 11/03/1989
  • Issued: 03/31/1992
  • Est. Priority Date: 11/03/1989
  • Status: Expired due to Term
First Claim
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1. For use with a computer system having a fault tolerant, intelligent mass storage disk array subsystem, the disk subsystem having a microprocessor based controller, a method for rebuilding a replacement disk drive within the array without system processor supervision or suspension of system operations comprising:

  • reading disk array and disk drive status information and fault tolerance mode for the disk array from reserved sectors on all disk drives within the drive array;

    reading disk array and disk drive status information and fault tolerance mode for the disk array from reserved sectors on all disk drives within the drive array;

    determining if one or more of the drives in the array has been replaced from disk drive status information;

    reading all sectors on the replacement drive, thereby causing a failed sector read to occur when attempting to read the replacement drive sectors, indicating a sector to be restored;

    generating rebuild commands for the replacement disk by writing to each failed sector utilizing the active fault tolerance mode;

    queueing the rebuild commands; and

    executing the rebuild commands by the microprocessor controller independent of the computer system processor, thereby restoring data to the replacement disk drive.

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