Method and apparatus for polling and selecting any paired device in any drawer

A device adapter maintains a device polling table in memory that can be dynamically changed in response to disk drive device failures and is updated with each poll so that failed devices can be quickly deleted from the table and alternate device polling mapping can be achieved. A system reconfiguration is not necessary to implement the modifications to the system processing. The device adapter is capable of a greater variety of processing tasks than is conventional, including determining cylinder head position and copying data that otherwise would be performed by a control unit.