Patent ID: 7607035
Filing Date: 2009-10-20
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A disk array apparatus comprising: a plurality of disk drives; and a control unit for performing data input/output processing of the disk drives in response to a data input/output request from a host system, wherein said control unit includes: a memory for storing control information for specifying a failure of at least one of the disk drives, and failure information of the faulty disk drive, a first circuit for specifying, from the failure information, the disk drive in which a time-out failure has occurred, and issuing an instruction to retry a control command to the disk drive, and a second circuit for outputting a control signal to the faulty disk drive in order to hard reset the disk drive if the disk drive does not recover from the failure by normally executing the retry control command, wherein the hard reset initializes a chip that includes an electronic circuit of the disk drive, wherein the control unit judges whether the disk array apparatus is in a warning state or not, and if the disk array apparatus is in the warning state, the control unit hard resets a suspected faulty disk drive and issues a spin-up command to the suspected faulty disk drive, thereby recovering the suspected faulty disk drive, wherein the warning state is a state in which any one of the disk drives is already in a locked-out state, wherein a suspected faulty disk drive is a disk drive that has sent an error message or a disk drive from which an acknowledgement has not been received within a specified period of time, and wherein the hard reset includes a power on reset of a disk drive.