Electricity: electrical systems and devices – Housing or mounting assemblies with diverse electrical... – For electronic systems and devices
Reexamination Certificate
2000-06-15
2001-09-18
Picard, Leo P. (Department: 2835)
Electricity: electrical systems and devices
Housing or mounting assemblies with diverse electrical...
For electronic systems and devices
C361S679090, C361S689000, C361S689000, C361S689000, C361S689000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06292360
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to the efficient packaging of mass memory units (such as hard disk drive arrays) having uniform or mixed form factors.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Large scale computer systems incorporate banks of mass storage units such as arrays of hard disk drives. Hard disk drive units currently available for this application typically employ 3.5 inch drives configured into one of two “height” form factors: one inch and 1.6 inch. Each disk drive is about four inches in “width”. The height and width dimensions are stated for industry categorization purposes only because the disk drives will operate in any orientation and are often arranged with the “height” dimension disposed horizontally; for example, in conventional nineteen inch rack mounts.
At the state of the art, the performance characteristics of 1.0 inch and 1.6 inch form factor disk drives may be summarized as follows:
The 1.6 inch disk drives generally have higher capacity and offer lower cost per unit of storage provided (i.e., cost per megabyte).
On the other hand, the one inch disk drives generally are less costly per disk drive and offer higher performance.
Disk drives in servers or disk subsystems are usually packaged in canisters which permit L ion of the disk drives including the support of hot plug/unplug functions. The canisters each have a connector adapted to engage a complementarily configured connector on a backplane which includes printed circuit traces conventionally interfacing with system circuitry. The position and orientation of a canister connector is typically established by an industry standard for the type of mass memory unit employed. Thus, because the mechanical dimensions of the disk drive caters and the electrical and mechanical interfaces are well defined into a respected standard, a ready interchange of canisters may be carried out.
It is common practice to include disk drive canisters in each of the one inch and 1.6 inch form fax in a given system to achieve an optimization of performance and storage capacity for the application. In the prior art, this has been achieved by adopting an electrical and mechanical design which directly supports the 1.6 inch disk drive canisters and which also accommodates the one inch disk drive in the same canisters. With this approach, however, the one inch disk drive canisters occupy the same “height” dimension as the 1.6 inch disk drive canisters. This approach is very easy to put into practice, but completely fails to allow the achievement of optimum space usage, and this is a significant drawback.
Of course, two different designs accommodating, respectively, a row (for example, in a standard nineteen inch rack mount) of one inch canisters and a row of 1.6 inch canisters can be provided, but this approach does not permit optimally mixing one inch and 1.6 inch canisters in a given row, and the advantage of the use of a single backplane and mechanical design is lost.
OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION
It is therefore a broad object of this invention to provide a mass memory packaging system in which mass memory units (e.g., disk drives) having first and second form factors can be mixed in a compact assembly.
It is a more specific object of this invention to provide such a mass memory packaging system in which canisters containing mass memory units are plugged into a backplane on which backplane connectors are disposed on modules carrying three backplane connectors each with the outer two connectors mutually oriented at 180°.
In another aspect, it is an object of this invention to provide a mass memory packaging system requiring only a single backplane module configuration to accommodate mass memory units having two different form factors, thereby eliminating the necessity for designing more than one such packaging system.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Briefly, these and other objects of the invention are achieved by a mass memory which includes a backplane (or other connector plane) module having three identical, aligned, backplane connectors arranged in a new configuration Two spaced apart backplane connectors are disposed in the same orientation with one another, but the third backplane connector is spaced apart from and disposed in 180°
0
orientation with respect to the second connector. With this configuration, two mass memory storage units having a first form factor or three mass memory storage units of a second, smaller, form factor may be coupled to the backplane to occupy substantially the same space, one mass memory unit in each case being oriented at 180°
0
with respect to the one or two other mass memory units.
REFERENCES:
patent: 6188571 (2001-02-01), Roganti et al.
patent: 6201692 (2001-03-01), Gamble et al.
Bull HN Information Systems Inc.
Chang Yean-Hsi
Hayden B. E.
Phillips J. H.
Picard Leo P.
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