Patent ID: 7558988

Claim:
A storage system, comprising: at least one disk drive storing data; a disk controller for controlling data access to said disk drive; a power supply controller for autonomously turning off a power source of said disk drive according to the data access status to said disk drive, and autonomously turning on the power source of said disk drive, which was turned off, after the lapse of a prescribed period from the time said power source was turned off irrespective of the data access status to said disk drive; and a media inspection unit for inspecting a failure in said disk drive in which the power source thereof was autonomously turned on irrespective of the data access status to said disk drive; wherein said power supply controller selects said disk drive for turning on the power source irrespective of the data access status to said disk drive based on a predefined policy, wherein said policy is to preferentially select a disk drive containing attribute information that coincides with or is similar to attribute information of said disk drive subject to a failure, and wherein said attribute information is one among a vendor name, disk drive type, storage capacity, model name, lot number, firmware revision, activation count, total operating time, previous inspection date, inspected final LBA, and status of user data stored of said disk drive.