Lsi Corporation

Jason B Schilling

Brad D Besmer

Scott Dominguez

Brian Worby

Cirila M Montano

Robin F Wright

The methods and structure herein provide for expanding the storage capacity of a RAID storage system while maintaining the same level of RAID storage management. A RAID storage controller may be coupled between a host computer and a RAID storage volume. The RAID storage controller manages the disk drives of the storage volume to present a single logical volume of storage to the host computer. When a storage expansion is desired, the RAID storage controller may communicatively couple to at least one expansion disk drive and begin transfer of data from the original RAID storage volume to the expansion disk drive(s). During this data transfer, read and write operations are continued to the original RAID storage volume. Additionally, the RAID storage controller duplicates write operations to the expansion disk drive(s) such that general storage operations required by the host computer are continued.

Online storage capacity expansion of a raid storage system

Systems and methods for improving performance of a re-synchronization process in a RAID level 1 storage system. In one aspect a local cache memory associated with the second or mirrored disk drive is enabled during the re-synchronization operation but left disabled during normal operation processing host requests. The cache is flushed to the persistent medium of the second disk drive before resuming normal I/O request processing. In another aspect normal I/O request processing is interleaved with portions of the processing for re-synchronization of the mirrored disk drive. Normal I/O request processing proceeds for a first period of time. Re-synchronization processing for a portion of the mirrored information then proceeds (with local cache memory of the mirrored disk drive enabled) for a second period of time.

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Colorado Springs, CO, United States of America

Jason B Schilling