Patent ID: 7039758

Claim:
A disk array system designed for connection to one or more computers comprising: one or more host input/output interfaces for connection to said one or more computers; a plurality of disk devices with a fixed-length unit of access; one or more disk input/output interfaces for connection to said plurality of disk devices; a cache for temporarily holding data to be transferred between one of said computers and said plurality of disk devices; and a cache controller that controls the input/output of data from/to said cache; wherein said cache controller divides data of a first form received from one of said computers into a plurality of blocks each having the size of said unit of access and each being called a piece of data of a second form, appends a validation code to each piece of said data of the second form, and stores all of said pieces of data of the second form together with their corresponding validation codes into said cache; and wherein said disk input/output interface stores both data of the second form and the validation codes appended to it into one of said plurality of disk devices, wherein said disk input/output interface splits data read from said cache into data of the second form and the validation codes appended to it and stores the data of the second form and the corresponding validation codes into separate areas of one or more of said plurality of disks, each said area having a size of the unit of access, wherein a plurality of validation codes are stored into a single area having the size of the unit of access so as to reduce an amount of storage space occupied by the validation codes.