Patent ID: 7941693
Filing Date: 2011-05-10
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A disk array apparatus, comprising: a plurality of disk drives; and a control unit that performs data input/output processing of the disk drives in response to a data input/output request from a host system, wherein the control unit includes: a memory that stores control information for identifying at least one of the plurality of disk drives as a suspected faulty disk drive, and that identifies failure information of the suspected faulty disk drive, a first circuit that identifies, from the failure information, the suspected faulty disk drive that is provisionally categorized as not having recovered from a suspected failure, and that issues a retry instruction to retry a control command to the suspected faulty disk drive, and a second circuit that outputs a control signal to the suspected faulty disk drive in order to hard-reset the suspected faulty disk drive if the suspected faulty disk drive does not recover from the suspected failure by normally executing the control command which was retried according to the retry instruction, wherein the hard-reset includes initializing a chip that includes an electronic circuit of the suspected faulty disk drive, wherein the control unit further determines whether or not the disk array apparatus is in a warning state, wherein further, if the disk array apparatus is in the warning state, the control unit hard-resets the suspected faulty disk drive and issues a spin-up command to the suspected faulty disk drive, to render a recovery of the suspected faulty disk drive from the suspected failure, wherein further the warning state is a state in which any of the disk drives is already in a locked-out state, wherein further the 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 further the hard-reset includes power reset of a disk drive.