Method of utilizing storage disks of differing capacity in a single storage volume in a hierarchic disk array

摘要

The methods concern fully utilizing storage capacity in a heterogenous hierarchic disk array (10) having storage disks (12) of differing capacities. The disks (12) are segmented into multiple regions (35). One method links non-contiguous regions from individual storage disks to form RAID areas. The RAID areas are mapped into a virtual storage space (40) that provides a view of the physical storage space as a single storage volume. Data is then stored in these RAID areas according to different redundancy criteria, such as RAID Level 1 and RAID Level 5. A second method fully utilizes of storage capacity by configuring the heterogeneous disk array to employ a minimum of two equal-sized storage disks that have larger capacity than other individual storage disks in the disk array. The contiguous regions across the multiple disks are then grouped together to form the RAID areas.