| 摘要 |
An interface (200) allows a given central processing unit (CPU) (102) to communicate concurrently with a large number of disk drives (110, 112, 114, 116, 118). In particular, more than one seek operation can be performed at the same time in serving a common processor (102). Additionally, the invention can combine standard physical drives (110, 112, 114, 116, 118) of any physical or logical configuration (e.g., storage capacity, number of heads) into one or more logical drives. In other words, heterogeneous physical drives (110, 112, 114, 116, 118) can be combined into one or more homogeneous logical drives as seen by the host operating system (1101). When applying the invention to IDE drives, a first on-board embodiment provides an enhanced IDE disk drive that is an extension of the industry-standard IDE drives, allowing an arbitrary number of independently seeking IDE drives on a conventially single-seeking, two-drive-maximum bus. In another "paddle board" embodiment, low cost IDE drives of arbitrary physical size, storage capacity and geometry can be combined simply and inexpensively into a high performance storage device. For example, a 3.5'' 80 megabyte (MB) drive can be transparently combined with a 2.5'' 60 MB drive. |
