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.

Date of Patent:
Nov. 04, 2008

Filed:

May. 03, 2007
Applicant:

Douglas W. Coatney, Cupertino, CA (US);

Inventor:

Douglas W. Coatney, Cupertino, CA (US);

Assignee:

Network Appliance, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);

Attorney:
Primary Examiner:
Int. Cl.
CPC ...
G06F 11/00 (2006.01);
U.S. Cl.
CPC ...
Abstract

A system and method for reducing unrecoverable errors in a disk drive by undertaking an aggressive reassignment of slow-reading or currently recoverable-but-erroneous sectors to the spares pool is provided. A recovered error is treated by the system operating system as a fatal error and thereby the sectors involved are reassigned to the spares pool immediately. Reassignment is recommended by a reassignment utility at the disk interface level, which passes a status up to the RAID subsystem by which reassignment is performed. In order to prevent a double-disk panic, the RAID subsystem is instructed to ignore reassignment recommendations of this type (e.g. reassignment of recoverable errors) if the RAID group is currently operating in a degraded state. However, if the RAID group is undegraded, then immediate assignment of the sectors encountering the recoverable error is undertaken.


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