Patent ID: 7290066

Claim:
A method for improving utilization of a SAS wide port having a number (n) PHYs associated therewith, the method comprising: receiving an I/O request from a requesting host system requesting a transaction involving a range of data having a size of S units of data, wherein the I/O request corresponds to an original SAS frame; determining if the size of the original SAS frame data (S) is greater than a threshold size (T); in response to a determination that S>T, performing the steps of: determining a number (M) of the n PHYs available for use to process the original SAS frame; subdividing the original SAS frame into M smaller SAS frames of substantially equal size; processing the M smaller SAS frames substantially in parallel using the M available PHYs; and returning a single status to the requesting host system indicating the status of the processing of the M smaller SAS frames.