INTEGRATED-CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION OF A STORAGE-SHELF ROUTER AND A PATH CONTROLLER CARD FOR COMBINED USE IN HIGH-AVAILABILITY MASS-STORAGE-DEVICE SHELVES AND THAT SUPPORT VIRTUAL DISK FORMATTING

One embodiment of the present invention is a virtual disk formatting system includes a mass-storage device having physical sectors that each contains a data payload of a first data length and additional information, including one or more of a sector number, error-detection, and error-correction information and a virtual disk interface to the mass-storage device, implemented in an integrated circuit, that maps access operations, received from external entities by the virtual disk interface, directed to a virtual disk having virtual sectors containing a data payload of a second data length by contiguously mapping an array of virtual-sector data payloads to a contiguous array of physical-sector data payloads without introducing padding data into physical-sector data payloads or into virtual-sector data payloads to align the initial bytes of virtual sectors and physical sectors.