Patent attributes
A self healing system in a RAID array to reduce the risk of loss of data on a disk drive caused by grown media defects on the disk drive. The grown media defects include radial and spiral scratches on the disk drive. When a first defect on a disk drive of the RAID array is located, the self healing system inspects adjacent areas around the first defect on the disk drive in order to immediately locate any additional defects which exist in adjacent areas around the first defect on the disk drive. The self healing system reconstructs the data associated with the first defect using parity, and then reconstructs the data associated with any additional defects using parity. This can be accomplished in the background to allow the host unimpeded access to customer data. As a result, the self healing system can eliminate a potential single point of failure when data is subsequently read from the RAID array.
