Abstract: A medical system may include an elongated flexible body including a channel extending through the elongated flexible body. The elongated flexible body includes an articulable portion extending along at least a portion of a length of the elongated flexible body. The medical system may include an instrument configured to be received in the channel of the elongated flexible body, a magnetic field generator configured to generate a magnetic field within the channel, and a magnetic field sensor configured to detect the magnetic field generated by the magnetic field generator.

Abstract: A fault tolerant storage subsystem includes a first tier of failure independent data storage units coupled to a storage controller, and a second tier, including at least one failure independent data storage unit, coupled to at least one of the failure independent data storage units in the first tier for providing further fault tolerance thereto. The first tier of failure independent data storage units may include a partially heterogeneous group of data storage units, which may include a solid state data storage unit. Data blocks representative of data received from the storage controller are stored on at least a first subset of the first tier of failure independent data storage units and associated redundancy blocks representative of redundancy information associates with the data blocks are stored on a second subset of the first tier of failure independent data storage units.

Abstract: A fault-tolerant storage device array using a solid-state storage unit for storage of redundancy information. The invention solves the redundancy bottleneck inherent in a RAID 4 architecture by replacing the electro-mechanical redundancy storage unit with a solid-state device (SSD). The present invention requires reading an old data block from a storage unit and an old redundancy data block from the SSD, then combining the old data block, a new data block, and the old redundancy data block to generate a new redundancy data block, and thereafter writing the new data block to a storage unit and the new redundancy data block to the SSD. However, reading the old redundancy data block from the SSD and writing the new redundancy data block to the SSD at electronic speeds takes a negligible amount of time compared to the Read and Write times of a typical rotating disk storage unit.

Abstract: A redundant array based data storage system used in computer systems for reducing the amount of time required to modify data records stored in the redundant array. The storage system reduces the number of transmissions between a storage unit within the redundant array and the array controller by incorporating a parity storage unit which is programmed to perform operations necessary to the calculation of a "parity code" which is used for error detection and correction. By integrating the redundancy information generation into the storage unit used to store the parity information, the number of transmissions between various component parts of the system is reduced, and so the amount of time required to perform a "read-modify-write" operation is reduced. Disk-type parity units having more than one read/write head are used to further increase the performance of the storage system by reducing the disk rotational latency time.

Abstract: An arrayed disk drive system for providing memory to a computer, said arrayed system having a plurality of disk drives configured to form an array, said arrayed disk drives accessed by a plurality of channels, each channel accessing a plurality of disk drives, including a means for controlling the logical configuration of the arrayed disk drives to appear to the computer as any conceivable arrangement of disk drives, whereby the arrayed disk drive may appear to the computer as the plurality of disk drives, or as one large disk drive comprised of all the arrayed disk drives, or any combination in between. A means for providing a plurality of levels of redundancy on data read or written by the computer to the arrayed disk drives is provided, as well as means controlled by the controlling means for enabling from none to the plurality of levels of redundancy to operate on data being read or written from the arrayed disk drives.