Aiwa Raid Technology, Inc.

Thomas Wille

Adriano Roganti

Ronald Bruce Smith

Jose Platon Basco

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for a mass storage subsystem such as a RAID array. The invention includes a housing which defines first and second cavities with the first cavity housing an array controller such as a RAID controller. The second cavity houses a plurality of substantially conventional IDE drives conforming to the 3.5&Prime; form factor. The array is configured to maximize cooling of the array controller and the drives within the extremely small space defined by the housing.

High density RAID subsystem with highly integrated controller

The present invention provides a method and apparatus whereby a single engine can manage multiple DMA queues and related functions for a mass storage subsystem such as a RAID array. By operating the engine at a suitably high clock rate, the key buses may be time multiplexed such that each bus operates at substantially its optimum frequency to maintain high efficiency of data throughput. To improve performance further, the DMA addressing function is allocated additional phases whenever the remaining buses have not requested access to the RAID engine.

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Lake Worth, FL, United States of America

Thomas Wille