Patent ID: 7849263

Claim:
A method of controlling storage capacity of a data storage system, the method comprising: activating a first set of storage devices of the data storage system and deactivating a second set of storage devices of the data storage system prior to an amount of storage capacity currently used in the data storage system reaching a predefined storage capacity threshold of the data storage system; monitoring the amount of storage capacity currently used in the data storage system in view of the predefined storage capacity threshold; and maintaining activation of the first set of storage devices of the data storage system and automatically activating the second set of storage devices of the data storage system in response to the amount of storage capacity currently used in the data storage system reaching the predefined storage capacity threshold; wherein the first set of storage devices includes a first set of disk drives and the second set of storage devices includes a second set of disk drives; wherein the data storage system includes: a high performance tier of disk drive storage having high-speed disk drives to accommodate fast response time data storage operations; a mid-level performance tier of disk drive storage having moderate-speed disk drives which are slower than the high-speed disk drives to accommodate database storage operations; and a low-level performance tier of disk drive storage to accommodate archive storage operations, the low-level performance tier of disk drive storage including the first and second sets of disk drives; wherein disk drives of the first and second sets of disk drives are slower than the moderate-speed disk drives; and wherein automatically activating the second set of storage devices of the data storage system in response to the amount of storage capacity currently used in the data storage system reaching the predefined storage capacity threshold includes spinning up and cooling the second set of disk drives of the low-level performance tier of disk drive storage.