The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 31, 1991
Filed:
Feb. 13, 1990
Robert H Dunphy, Jr, Holland, PA (US);
Robert Walsh, Boulder, CO (US);
John H Bowers, Clarksburg, NY (US);
George A Rudeseal, Boulder, CO (US);
Storage Technology Corporation, Louisville, CO (US);
Abstract
The disk drive memory of the present invention uses a large plurality of small form factor disk drives to implement an inexpensive, high performance, high reliability disk drive memory that emulates the format and capability of large form factor disk drives. The plurality of disk drives are switchably interconnectable to form redundancy groups of N+M parallel connnected disk drives to store data thereon. The N+M disk drives are used to store the N segments of each data word plus M redundancy segments. In addition, a pool of R backup disk drives is maintained to automatically substitute a replacement disk drive for a disk drive in a redundancy group that fails during operation. The number N of data segments in each data redundancy group can be varied throughout the disk drive memory to thereby match the characteristics of the input data or operational parameters within the disk drive memory. Furthermore, a group of U unassigned disk drives can be maintained as a stock of disk drives that can be powered up as needed and assigned to either a redundancy group or to the pool of backup disk drives.