DISK AEROBICS primary purpose is to:

• Provide ongoing and continuous data verification on a drive by drive basis
• Proactively monitor and manage drive health by periodically exercising all disks and detecting potential drive failures before they occur
• Copies data from a "suspect", potentially failing drive to a new "healthy" spare drive, avoiding lengthy RAID rebuild times and data loss

In order to deliver on its promise the following steps occur on each drive:

• Disk drive is selected and powered on – the drive is spun up
• DISK AEROBICS ensures that the drive functions within parameters
• The health of drive segments, tracks and sectors are inspected to avoid drive failure and re-builds
• The data is read to insure its integrity
• The drive is spun down and powered off
• Details of the operation are recorded and tracked

DISK AEROBICS is the key enabling factor that allows drives to be powered own for short or long periods of time whilst maintaining data integrity and drive availability. COPAN Systems' application of this technology has enabled a massively dense array of storage capacity with increased reliability, availability and longevity of commodity drive technology.