Adaptec, Inc.

John F Considine

Jeffrey T Wong

A system and method for rapidly zeroing/clearing a container in a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) provides the writing of a series of logical zeros to each disk in the container using an internal bus driver-level command. The command causes a small data block of all zeroes written to the disk to be duplicated so that the entire container space in each disk is effectively written-to. The bus driver is preferably a small computer system interface (SCSI) architecture that supports a WRITE SAME command. Where the disk device fails to support the WRITE SAME command then an alternative process is employed, in which a single large sized memory block is created and initial sized with all zeroes. A predetermined number of virtual scatter gather elements are created, each pointing to the memory block. The data in these scatter gather elements is written to the unsupported device so as to clear the entire container space of that device using a smaller block than the overall space requires for complete clearance.

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N. Billerica, MA, United States of America

John F Considine