A method of accessing a plurality of storage devices is disclosed. A system and a computer program product for emulating tape libraries are also disclosed. First and second virtual storage devices with first and second address spaces, respectively, are defined. The first and second address spaces are mapped to portions on each of a plurality of storage devices. The storage devices can be part of a power managed RAID system where all the storage devices are not powered on at one time. A stream of contiguous address values are received and a storage device is selected. Finally, data is stored on the portion of the selected storage device so that multiple data streams can be written at all times, even though all the storage devices are not powered on. Similarly, stored data may be retrieved from the selected storage device by traversing the scattered streams.

 
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> Method of garbage collection on a data storage system

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