Patent ID: 7895464

Claim:
A RAID system comprising: a plurality of hard disk drives; a first RAID controller and a second RAID controller, each of said RAID controllers including a cache memory, and each of said RAID controllers electrically connected to said plurality of hard disk drives; a first serial attached SCSI (SAS) or serial ATA (SATA) (SAS/SATA) input/output (I/O) circuit associated with said first RAID controller and a second SAS/SATA I/O circuit associated with said second RAID controller; said first SAS/SATA I/O circuit directly electrically connected to said second SAS/SATA I/O circuit; wherein said first SAS/SATA I/O circuit includes a first plurality of SAS/SATA ports and said second SAS/SATA I/O circuit includes a second plurality of SAS/SATA ports, and wherein each said SAS/SATA port in said first plurality of SAS/SATA ports is connected to one of said SAS/SATA ports in said second plurality of SAS/SATA ports; wherein said first SAS/SATA I/O circuit includes a first SAS/SATA I/O chip having a first SAS/SATA I/O port and a second SAS/SATA I/O chip having a second SAS/SATA I/O port, and said second SAS/SATA I/O circuit includes a third SAS/SATA I/O chip having a third SAS/SATA I/O port and a fourth SAS/SATA I/O chip having a fourth SAS/SATA I/O port, and wherein said first SAS/SATA I/O port is connected to said third SAS/SATA I/O port and said second SAS/SATA I/O port is connected to said fourth SAS/SATA I/O port; and wherein said plurality of disk drives includes a first plurality of hard disk drives and a second plurality of disk drives, each of said first SAS/SATA I/O chip and said third SAS/SATA I/O chip is connected to said first plurality of disk drives, and each of said second I/O chip and said fourth I/O chip is connected to said second plurality of hard disk drives.