US Patent 10990527 Storage array with N-way active-active backend

A SAN storage node has multiple engines, each including at least one computing node with at least one drive adapter for accessing arrays of drives. All drives of the SAN node are accessible by all drive adapters. The drives are organized into hypers. Each hyper is accessible to all drive adapters. Each drive is temporarily associated with a preferred owner for spin-up. A drive adapter that initializes spin-down of one of the drives takes a spindle lock on the drive being spun-down and prompts all other drive adapters to complete outstanding IOs on the drive being spun-down.