METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF REED-SOLOMON PARITY OPERATIONS IN REDUNDANT ARRAY OF INEXPENSIVE DISKS

摘要

A standalone hardware engine is used on an advanced function storage adaptor to improve the performance of a Reed-Solomon-based RAID-6 implementation. The engine can perform the following operations; generate P and Q parity for a full stripe write, generate updated P and Q parity for a partial stripe write, generate updated P and Q parity for a single write to one drive in a stripe, generate the missing data for one or two drives. The engine requires all the source data to be in the advanced function storage adaptor memory (external DRAM) before it is started, the engine only needs to be invoked once to complete any of the four above listed operations, the engine will read the source data only once and output to memory the full results for any of the listed four operations. In some prior-art systems, for N inputs, there would be 6N+2 memory accesses. With this approach, the same operation would require only N+2 memory accesses.