Appeal No. 2006-1540
Application No. 10/113,338
from column 1, line 15 et seq. of Menon, the examiner concludes
that the skilled artisan would have been motivated to use
striping.
There is no doubt that appellants did not invent “striping,”
per se. The question is why the artisan would have taken any
teaching of striping from Menon and adapted Ohizumi in such a
manner as to provide for rebuilding stripe units in a disk in a
disk array stripe by stripe, wherein each disk in the disk array
comprises a plurality of stripe units, wherein a stripe is a
group of corresponding stripe units from each disk in the disk
array, as claimed. The examiner does not adequately answer this
question.
In determining what appellants have invented, we look to
both the instant claims and the description in the specification.
It is clear to us from a review of the specification that the
concepts of striping, stripe unit, the use of a spare disk for
storing data from a failed disk, and expansion were known in the
art. At pages 3-4 of the specification, in describing the
background, i.e., prior art, appellants describe the concept of
employing a hot spare disk in an array of disks in a RAID that is
dedicated for storing data from a failed disk. This hot disk may
be unused where there is no failure of a disk in the array. When
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