Patent ID: 7685463

Claim:
A disk drive management system comprising: a data storage device including an array of disk drives; a host computer for controlling the operation of the data storage device; the array of disk drives including: an operational drive pool including a number of online disk drives having data written to and read from by the host computer; a spares drive pool including a number of disk drives that are configured to be included in the operational drive group, but are offline while in the spares group; a maintenance drive pool including a maintenance manager for testing faulty disk drives from the operational drive pool; and a failed drive pool for receiving disk drives transitioned from the maintenance drive pool after testing conducted by the maintenance drive pool determines that a drive has failed; wherein, when a faulty drive is transitioned from the operational drive pool upon the occurrence of a particular error, a disk drive from the spares drive pool is transitioned to the operational drive pool to take the place of the faulty drive; and wherein disk drives in the failed drive pool are removed for service at periodic intervals.