Silicon Image Assigned Patent

Silicon Image, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,595,434) developed by three co-inventors for a method and system “for providing advanced storage features using commodity, consumer-level storage devices.”

The co-inventors are J. D. Northcutt, Menlo Park, CA, James G. Hanko, Redwood City, CA, and Brian K. Schmidt, Mountain View, CA.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A method and system for providing advanced storage features using commodity, consumer-level storage devices is provided. The advanced storage system is a component that is connected between the computer system and one or more physical disk drives. The host interface of the advanced storage system presents itself to the computer system as a virtual disk drive that implements the commands of consumer-level storage hardware that are familiar to the host controller of the computer system. Similarly, the storage device interface of the advanced storage system presents itself to one or more disk drives as a consumer-level host controller, regardless of the actual topology of the physical storage devices that are connected. This system provides a simple way for a user to combine low-cost, consumer-level hardware to add advanced storage features to a computer system.”

The patent application was filed on Aug. 24, 2006 (11/510,254).