Digital Equipment Corporation

Steven J Malan

David William Thiel

Robert A Ellis

Alan Rollow

Richard B Wells

Sid Snyder

Clark Edward Lubbers

Peter Rivera

A storage system having a plurality of disks arranged in a RAID array with one of said disks being a replacement disk. A method and apparatus for restoring the contents of the replacement disk without interrupting concurrent access to the RAID array. An access request by a user application to a data block in the replacement disk results in regeneration and reconstruction of the accessed data block. In addition, the systematic reconstruction of data or parity blocks not yet accessed by the user application occurs by locating status bits associated with each data and parity block of the new disk.

Method and apparatus for the on-line restoration of a disk in a RAID-4

Data storage systems using a RAID-4 or RAID-5 organization divide an application I/O request into a number of individual I/O requests, each of which is contained within the boundaries of a single strip. The data blocks of each chunk on a strip responsive to an I/O request can form a complex geometric pattern requiring complicated operations to perform the I/O request. To simplify the necessary operations, each individual I/O request to a strip is divided into at most three requests targeted to data blocks forming a rectangle and each of these rectangles are processed as a unit. If a data block within a rectangle is unavailable, then the request to that rectangle is further subdivided into at most two requests targeted to data blocks forming smaller, non-overlapping rectangles which collectively are the original rectangle. The recursive decomposition of rectangles into smaller rectangles isolates the data block with an error and permits the selection of fewer and less complicated operation algorithms to complete the I/O request.

Method of reducing the complexity of an I/O request to a RAID-4 or

A data storage system using a RAID array and a logging process and apparatus that identifies a parity block that may not contain the proper parity for its associated data blocks and which prevents such inconsistent parity information from being used in the regeneration of unavailable data. A small fraction of the blocks of each disk are dedicated to storing parity metadata bits. The parity metadata is associated with the parity blocks and identifies whether or not each parity block contains the proper parity information for its associated data blocks or may contain invalid information. The data integrity of the RAID array is preserved by preventing the generation of undetected corrupt data.

Method and apparatus for preserving data integrity in a multiple disk

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Steven J Malan