The invention provides a software and hardware cooperative multi-controller disk array designing method. Along with increasing of controller quantities, heartbeat calculating load of each controller is fixed, and fault judging time is also fixed. Bidirectional annular heartbeats can enable failures of a plurality of continuous controllers to be faster found, and have good expansibility. The bidirectional annular heartbeats are operated on a system software layer and belong to a software heartbeat mechanism. Due to the fact that the software heartbeats are operated in the controllers, when the controllers fail, the split-brain problem is easy to cause. Therefore, in design of the software and hardware cooperative multi-controller disk array designing method, the software heartbeat mechanism is cooperated with a hardware arbitration mechanism, the split-brain problem is avoided, state monitoring reliability of the controllers is improved, delay of finding a fault is reduced, efficient and reliable system state maintenance is achieved, and normal and stable operation of a storage service is ensured.