Patent ID: 8201001

Claim:
A method for drive management and data placement in an archival storage system which includes a set of drives, said method comprising: mapping a plurality of redundant data stripes onto the set of drives; selecting a first active data stripe from the plurality of redundant data stripes, the first active data stripe being located on a first subset of the set of drives; placing the first subset into a first power state; placing a second subset of the set of drives into a second power state, the second power state being a lower power state than the first power state; and writing a first set of data to the first active data stripe, when the first active data stripe contains an amount of data that is smaller than a maximum data capacity value of the first active data stripe, selecting a second active data stripe from the plurality of redundant data stripes, the second active data stripe being located on a third subset of the set of drives, the third subset including at least one drive of the second subset, wherein the selected second active data stripe is selected via implementation of an algorithm, and is selected based upon degree of overlap between the second active data stripe and the first active data stripe for promoting increased power efficiency of the archival storage system.