Patent ID: 7627714

Claim:
A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having computer usable program code programmed for preventing write starvation in a storage controller with access to low performance storage devices, the operations of the computer program product comprising: assigning a storage device write cache limit for each storage device accessible to a storage controller, the storage device write cache limit comprising a maximum amount of a write cache of the storage controller available to a storage device for a write operation, wherein at least one storage device comprises a low performance storage device and a total amount of storage available to the storage devices comprises an amount greater than a total storage capacity of the write cache; setting a low performance write cache limit, the low performance write cache limit comprising a total amount of write cache available for use by low performance storage devices for write operations, wherein the amount of write cache available to the low performance storage devices comprises an amount less than the total storage capacity of the write cache, receiving a request to store an update to a low performance storage device; and storing the update in the write cache in response to the size of the update plus an amount of the write cache occupied by updates ready to be written to the low performance storage device being less than or equal to the storage device write cache limit; and the size of the update plus an amount of the write cache occupied by updates ready to be written to the low performance storage devices accessible to the storage controller being less than or equal to the low performance write cache limit; and writing the update to the low performance storage device.