Appeal No. 2006-1540
Application No. 10/113,338
a disk in the array fails, the data that used to be on that
failed disk may be rebuilt to the hot spare disk. Once the
failed disk is either repaired or replaced by a spare disk, the
data on the repaired or spare disk may be rebuilt using the data
on the hot spare disk.
This description of the background, at page 3 of the instant
specification, appears to be a prior art description which sounds
like what is disclosed by Ohizumi. For example, the abstract of
Ohizumi states that
…when a fault occurs in one of a plurality of
regular disk storages and a disk storage for parity,
restored data generated from data stored in the
remaining functioning disks is written to the spare
disk storage, and the restored data is copied to a
new disk storage which has replaced the faulty disk.
But, as further explained by the instant specification, at
pages 3-4, the hot spare disk may be distributed among the array
of disks to lessen the number of reads and writes to complete the
rebuild, wherein each stripe may comprise a stripe unit
designated to store data corresponding to a stripe unit from a
failed disk. These stripe units designated to store data
corresponding to a stripe unit from a failed disk in the same
stripe may be referred to as “spare units.” Thus, once a disk in
the array fails, the data that used to be on the failed disk may
be rebuilt to spare units distributed among the remaining disks
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