Patent ID: 8385061

Claim:
A system, comprising: a storage controller configured for communicatively coupling with a server; and a meta-disk volume group including a plurality of meta-disk drive groups, each meta-disk drive group including a plurality of disk drives, each meta-disk drive group configured for being communicatively coupled with the storage controller, each of the plurality of disk drives including a drive interface connector configured for aggregation of the plurality of disk drives of each meta-disk drive group such that a single device address is assigned to each meta-disk drive group, each disk drive of the plurality of disk drives being enclosed by a particular drive carrier assembly configured to be inserted into or extracted from a slot of a single drive enclosure, whereby each meta-disk drive group includes an extractor for synchronized extraction of the meta-disk drive group's associated drive carrier assemblies from the single drive enclosure in a single extraction, wherein each of the plurality of disk drives includes a meta-disk drive group enable/disable jumper configured for being communicatively coupled with each disk drive of the plurality of disk drives via the drive interface connector, each drive interface connector of the plurality of disk drives of each meta-disk drive group configured for being communicatively coupled to each of the remaining drive interface connectors of the plurality of disk drives, thereby allowing the plurality of disk drives to communicate as a single device with the storage controller through the use of the single device address assigned to each meta-disk drive group, wherein the single drive enclosure encloses the plurality of meta-disk drive groups of the meta-disk volume group, wherein the storage controller is configured to communicate with a plurality of meta-disk drive groups or with at least one meta-disk drive group and at least one disk drive, wherein input/output (I/O) traffic is directed to the single device address of each meat-disk drive group of the meta-disk volume group via a back-end channel of the storage controller, and wherein the meta-disk volume group has an input/output bandwidth and storage density greater than an input/output bandwidth and storage density of a volume group having a same number of individual disk drives as a number of meta-disk drive groups of the meta-disk volume group.