System for providing an interrogating host computer with group status information about disk devices including status information regarding disk devices not accessible to said host

摘要

A method and apparatus for determining information about a plurality of disk storage devices connected to an interrogating host computer through a disk drive controller employ, in one embodiment, an EVPD Inquiry command to obtain from a disk controller, connected to the interrogating host computer over a SCSI bus, the necessary information for devices which are not accessible to the interrogating host. The disk drive controller has sufficient capability to obtain the necessary information from the disk storage devices and format it for presentation to the host computer using standard VPD pages.