DISK ARRAY STORAGE SYSTEM CONTAINING HIGH-PERFORMANCE PARITYFUNCTION ARCHITECTURE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To improve the operating performance of a disk drive by providing an independent parity auxiliary engine and a local memory to an RA ID storage system so as to omit access to the disk drive required for parity calculation. SOLUTION: During disk write operation, data blocks received through a host SCSI channel 14 are stored in a local memory 136. A parity auxiliary engine 132 reads the data, calculates parity information and stores the result again to the local memory 136. Then a final data block is written to an adequate disk drive from the local memory 136. The local memory 136 consists of a DRAM or the like and is provided with a 72-bit interface to obtain economically a high frequency band. The parity auxiliary engine 132 uses a 128-byte FIFO to calculate the parity of the data in the local memory 136 in the unit of 1 burst at a time.