Patent ID: 8046536

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 communicates with each disk controller to determine what kind of disk drive is attached to said disk controller, based on an indication of what kind of disk drive is attached to said disk controller, selects an appropriate protocol for the disk drive, sends a request to said disk controller to retrieve detailed information of the disk drive attached to said disk controller using the selected protocol, and wherein said detailed information is retrieved from a disk management table stored in said memory unit, wherein said disk management table includes entries of number of sectors, serial number of the disk drive, and status of disk drive, wherein said storage system sends information of said disk controller to the user interface program for display on a monitor of said management console, wherein said status of disk drives includes a number of errors which may have occurred when data is read from or written to the disk drive.