Patent ID: 8892527

Claim:
A method in a storage server for reading specially allocated data, the method comprising: receiving a request to read a data set stored on a computer-readable storage medium of the storage server, the data set including a plurality of data blocks, each of the data blocks having a pointer identifying a location of the corresponding data block on a storage device of the storage server, the plurality of data blocks including at least one data block having a pointer identifying a location on the storage device that was pre-allocated to store a specially allocated data block; and for each data block, comparing the pointer of the data block to a special pointer to determine whether the corresponding data block is specially allocated on the storage device of the storage server, wherein the special pointer identifies a location on the storage device that was pre-allocated to store a specially allocated data block; in an event that the pointer is determined to match the special pointer, retrieving the corresponding specially allocated data block from memory of the storage server without issuing a request to read the specially allocated data block from the storage device of the storage server; in an event that the pointer is determined not to match the special pointer, determining whether the corresponding data block is stored in a cache of the storage server; in an event that the corresponding data block is stored in the cache, retrieving the corresponding data block from the cache; and in an event that the corresponding data block is not stored in the cache, issuing a request to retrieve the corresponding data block from the storage device.