PLX Technology Assigned Patent

PLX Technology Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,468,301) developed by Nicholas Hugh Withers, Bicester, UK, for "writing of data on an array of storage devices with controlled granularity."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A disk array control apparatus controls writing of data onto an array of N storage devices such as disk drives, where N is an integer of 3 or greater. Each storage device writes data with a granularity of a sector having a predetermined sector size. The apparatus writes data with a granularity of a transfer unit having a transfer size which is T times the sector size, where T is a plural integer greater than (N-1). The apparatus is allows writing to an array of storage devices for which (N-1) is not a factor of T. In particular, the apparatus divides each transfer unit of data into plural stripes each consisting of a respective plural number of sectors of data having the sector size, the stripes each consisting of at most (N-1) sectors and at least one of the stripes consisting of less than (N-1) sectors, and calculates, in respect of each stripe, a parity sector of parity data. The sectors of data and the parity sector representing the parity of each stripe are written onto different storage devices."

The patent application was filed on May 18, 2007 (12/227,449).