Patent ID: 8904244

Claim:
A method for reducing an amount of time required for performing consistency checking in a redundant storage system including a primary drive and at least one redundant drive, the method comprising steps of: providing an information repository associated with each of the primary drive and at least one redundant drive; storing, in said information repository, information relating to input/output failures on the primary drive and the at least one redundant drive; determining a likelihood that one or more regions of at least one of the primary drive and the at least one redundant drive contains inconsistent data as a function of the information stored in said information repository; and performing consistency checking on the one or more regions of at least one of the primary drive and the at least one redundant drive determined to have at least a prescribed likelihood of containing inconsistent data to thereby reduce the amount of time required for performing consistency checking; wherein the step of determining the likelihood that one or more regions of at least one of the primary drive and the at least one redundant drive contains inconsistent data comprises monitoring one or more responses between a target device and an initiator device, and when a given one of the responses matches at least one entry in the information repository, initiating a prescribed action based on the given one of the responses.