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:
Jul. 23, 2002
Filed:
Jun. 27, 2000
John F. Considine, N. Billerica, MA (US);
Jeffrey T. Wong, Newton, MA (US);
Adaptec, Inc., Milpitas, CA (US);
Abstract
A system and method for rapidly zeroing/clearing a container in a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) provides the writing of a series of logical zeros to each disk in the container using an internal bus driver-level command. The command causes a small data block of all zeroes written to the disk to be duplicated so that the entire container space in each disk is effectively written-to. The bus driver is preferably a small computer system interface (SCSI) architecture that supports a WRITE SAME command. Where the disk device fails to support the WRITE SAME command then an alternative process is employed, in which a single large sized memory block is created and initial sized with all zeroes. A predetermined number of virtual scatter gather elements are created, each pointing to the memory block. The data in these scatter gather elements is written to the unsupported device so as to clear the entire container space of that device using a smaller block than the overall space requires for complete clearance.