Patent attributes
Techniques are disclosed for using virtual drives to provide RAID groups in a data storage system. A pool of virtual drives is generated by i) dividing each one of a set of physical drives into multiple regions of physically contiguous non-volatile data storage, and ii) allocating individual regions of physically contiguous non-volatile data storage to corresponding virtual drives contained in a pool of virtual drives. RAID groups are then formed, where each one of the RAID groups is made up of a set of virtual drives assigned to the RAID group from the pool of virtual drives. One or more storage objects is then mapped to each RAID group, and host I/O operations received by the data storage system and directed to the storage object mapped to the RAID group are serviced using the set of virtual drives assigned to the RAID group.
