Patent ID: 6848022
Filing Date: 2005-01-25
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method of providing disk fault tolerance in an array of independent disks, wherein the disks are indexed and organized into a plurality of indexed stripes, each stripe further comprising a plurality of strips indexed by both disk and stripe, each of the strips being located on only a corresponding single disk, the method comprising: arranging strips containing data into horizontal and diagonal parity sets, wherein each parity set comprises at least one data strip as a member and no single data strip is repeated in any one parity set; calculating a horizontal parity for each horizontal parity set; calculating a diagonal parity for each diagonal parity set; storing each respective calculated horizontal parity of each horizontal parity set in a corresponding strip of a horizontal parity disk; and storing at least some of the calculated diagonal parities of each diagonal parity set in a respective one of a plurality of strips of a diagonal parity disk and storing a remainder of the calculated diagonal parities in a respective one of a plurality of strips in a diagonal parity stripe so that no members of the diagonal parity set have the same disk index as the disk index of the respective one of the plurality of strips of the diagonal parity stripe.