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:
Jun. 25, 1996
Filed:
Dec. 30, 1993
S M Islam, Boca Raton, FL (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
The queuing of commands on an input/output controller for a parity drive, in a level 4 or level 5 redundant array of inexpensive disk drives responds to receipt of a write instruction with appended data by determining a logical block address of a data drive for the appended data and a logical block address of a parity drive for redundant data belonging to a destination stripe of the appended data. If a parity cache entry corresponds to the parity address, a cache hit has occurred. Responsive to a cache hit, computation of replacement parity data for the stripe may be done from parity data in cache at a location given by the parity cache entry, data read from the data drive and the appended data. The newly calculated parity data is then placed in cache. A command is then sent to an input/output controller for the drive where the parity data is located to write the replacement parity data. Serialization of access to the parity data is moved from the disk drive to cache memory, allowing command queuing to be used with the disk drive to preserve optimum available performance of the drive.