Patent ID: 7308534

Claim:
A storage system comprising: a memory unit which has stored therein a disk management program; a plurality of disk controllers each having a Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface (SAS) port which can be attached to either a SAS disk drive or a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drive; and a local area network (LAN) port which communicates with a user interface program in a management console via a network, wherein when said disk management program receives a request from said user interface program requesting information as to what kinds of disk drives are attached to said disk controllers, said disk management program sends a request to said disk controller to retrieve detailed information of the disk drive attached to said disk controller which retrieves the detailed information of each disk drive using an appropriate protocol, and sends the detailed information received from said disk controllers back to the user interface program for display on a monitor of said management console, wherein said detailed information is retrieved from a disk management table stored in said memory unit, wherein said disk management table includes a plurality of entries each having an identification (ID) number of each disk controller, a status of a port in said disk controller to which a disk drive is attached, a sector size, a number of sectors, a serial number of the disk drive, and a number of errors which may have occurred when data is read from or written to the disk drive.