Patent ID: 7103798

Claim:
A disk array comprising: a disk array rack; a plurality of disk drives installed in the disk array rack; a controller installed in the disk array rack to control data reads and writes to and from the disk drives; and cables connecting the controller with the disk drives, wherein the disk drives comprise: first disk drives, and second disk drives with an interface different from that of the first disk drives, wherein the controller, when it decides that one of the first disk drives fails, performs sparing on the failed first disk drives by using the second disk drives, wherein the controller comprises: a decision unit to determine whether or not to disable each of the disk drives based on the number of errors that occur in each disk drive during its read and write operations, a sparing control unit to control sparing processing which, when it is decided that a particular disk drive shall be disabled, assigns a part of the plurality of disk drives as spares for the disabled disk drive, and an anomaly notification unit to notify an occurrence of the disabled state to a predetermined notification destination at a predetermined notification timing, wherein the anomaly notification unit sets the notification timing so that the anomaly notification resulting from the sparing processing performed between the disk drives of different kinds is issued earlier than the anomaly notification resulting from the sparing processing performed between the disk drives of the same kind.