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. 26, 2012
Filed:
Apr. 12, 2007
James Taylor, Livermore, CA (US);
Atul Goel, Foster City, CA (US);
James Leong, Hillsborough, CA (US);
James Taylor, Livermore, CA (US);
Atul Goel, Foster City, CA (US);
James Leong, Hillsborough, CA (US);
NetApp, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
Embodiments of the present invention disclose a technique for providing an indication whether data stored on a disk drive are invalid. As used herein, invalid data are data written prior to the disk drive being added to an array of the disk drives or data in a block that has become free and which has been removed from the corresponding parity block of the stripe. Knowing that the disk drive was written prior to the drive being added to the existing array or having data which has become invalid allows a storage server to ignore the invalid data and not to use it when computing parity (i.e., a data protection value computed as a result of a logical operation on data blocks in a stripe in the array of disk drives). This, in turn, eliminates the need to zero disk drives or to perform parity re-computation prior to using the disk drives.