Patent ID: 7093069

Claim:
A method of facilitating availability of data in a RAID system in which each of a plurality of disk drive modules comprises at least two of a plurality of disk drives, the method comprising: identifying a maximum number of disk drives within any one of the plurality of disk drive modules that can be connected to one of a plurality of RAID controllers, wherein the maximum number is based on a RAID management algorithm and is the number of disk drives permitted to be missing from any one of a plurality of logical unit numbers (LUNs) associated with data stored on the plurality of disk drives; defining connections between said one of the plurality of RAID controllers and one or more disk drives contained in each of two or more of the plurality of disk drive modules, a number of the one or more disk drives not exceeding the maximum number; wherein identifying the maximum number of disk drives further comprises: selecting a number of disk drives to be missing from any one of the plurality of LUNs; finding the RAID management algorithm in accordance with the selected number; evaluating performance of the RAID management algorithm; and if a result of the evaluation is satisfactory, considering the maximum number to be equal to the selected number.