US 5,708,848 A · Paddle board interface for concurrent seeks on multiple disk drives of a computer

Abstract

An interface allows a given CPU (Central Processing Unit) to communicate concurrently with a large number of disk drives in a high-performance, low-cost system. Plural seek operations can be performed concurrently, to serve a common processor. Also, heterogeneous physical drives--of any physical or logical configuration (storage capacity, number of heads, and so forth)--can be combined into one or more "logical" drives as seen by a host operating system. An "on-board" embodiment provides an "enhanced" IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) disk drive that is an extension of the industry-standard IDE drives, allowing an arbitrary number of independently seeking IDE drives on a conventionally single-seeking, two-drive-maximum bus. In a "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 MB (megabyte) drive can be transparently combined with a 2.5" 60 MB drive. The inventive concept can thus be embodied with either a "paddle board" controller (with standard IDE drives), or with no additional controller (employing "enhanced" IDE drives).

Claims11

Dependent claims

A computer system, comprising:

a) a processor connected to a first bus and executing software normally allowing only a single seek operation at a time to be performed for the processor;
b) a plurality of data storage devices, the plurality of data storage devices collectively having:
1) interfaces normally not allowing plural seek operations to be performed concurrently;
and
2) means for performing the plural seek operations;
and
c) an interface portion, connected between the first bus and the data storage devices, the interface portion including:
1) means for interfacing the first bus to the data storage devices, and for allowing plural seek operations to be concurrently performed on respective plural data storage devices for the processor, still using the software normally allowing only a single seek operation at a time to be performed for the processor.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Paddle board interface for concurrent seeks on multiple disk drives of a computer

Life of this patent

Paddle board interface for concurrent seeks on multiple disk drives of a computer

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims11