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:
Apr. 13, 1999
Filed:
Sep. 27, 1996
Andras Sarkozy, Nashua, NH (US);
John O'Brien, Nashua, NH (US);
Gregory Flynn, North Reading, MA (US);
Storage Computer Corporation, Nashua, NH (US);
Abstract
A protection mechanism for use in a mass storage system for providing user selectable levels of protection against data loss wherein storage segments of a plurality of disk drives are organized into at least two functionally separate logical units and a memory management mechanism is responsive to an identification of a logical unit as selected for mirroring by writing a first copy of a data block assigned to a first storage address in a designated logical unit into the assigned storage address in the designated logical unit and writing a second copy of the data block into a second storage address in the disk drives wherein the second storage address is skewed with respect to the first storage address so that the second storage address is located in a disk drive separate from the data disk drive containing the first storage address, and writing at least one parity block containing parity information relating to the data block into a disk drive. The mechanism allows a user to select to write data blocks to the disk drives without corresponding parity information being stored in the disk drives, and to later enter the parity information.