Patent ID: 6925530

Claim:
A method for initializing an array of drives, comprising: providing an array of drives including a first drive and a second drive, a controller and a bus subsystem that enables communications between said controller and said array of drives, each of said drives being associated with a priority and with said first drive having greater priority than said second drive; and causing substantially equal usage of said bus subsystem by all of said drives while performing a zero initialization of said drives: wherein said causing substantially equal usage of said bus subsystem includes: issuing a number of write related operations to each of said drives in said array, wherein each of said number of write related operations issued to a one of said drives concerns a different logical block address range than any other of said number of write related operations issued to said one of said drives, wherein said number of write related operations are queued; determining whether each of said drives has completed at least one of said number of write operations concerning at least one logical block address range, wherein each of said number of write operations is associated with more than one logical block address; in response to determining that each of said drives has not completed at least one of said number of write operations concerning at least one logical block address range, deferring issuing at least one more write related operation and continuing said determining whether each of said drives has completed at least one of said number of write operations concerning at least one logical block address range; and in response to determining that each of said drives has completed at least one of said number of write operations concerning at least one logical block address range, issuing at least one more write related operation to each of said drives in said array.