Appeal No. 2006-1540
Application No. 10/113,338
directed to failures which occur during the expansion process
when some but not all data has been correctly written, nor does
it involve the copying of data in particular stripe units.
Therefore, it is difficult to see how Ohizumi can be considered
to teach or suggest employing stripe units and mirroring in the
specific manner claimed, viz., “mirroring said data to a stripe
unit that corresponds to said particular stripe unit in a same
stripe if said particular stripe unit was rebuilt during said
expansion process, wherein said mirror stripe unit is located in
another disk of said disk array.”
The examiner admits that Ohizumi teaches nothing about
stripes and stripe units, relying on Menon for this teaching.
Menon is no more instructive than what appellants appear to admit
to be prior art, at pages 1-5 of the instant specification. It
is agreed that striping and stripe units, per se, were known, but
whereas each updated stripe had to be tracked during expansion in
the prior art, appellants claim a method and apparatus and
computer program product that eliminates this time-consuming
tracking process through a particular process or structure.
Taking claim 1 as exemplary, a method of performing an
expansion, i.e., of copying back the spare unit data onto the
repaired or spare disk stripe by stripe, is claimed, the method
of expansion following very specific steps:
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