Patent ID: 7865673

Claim:
A method for writing data to a storage pool, comprising: receiving a first write operation for a first block; determining a first replication type for the first block; determining a number of physical blocks (n 1 ) required to write the first block to the storage pool using a size of the first block and the first replication type; if n 1 is not a multiple of a maximum supported replication level of the storage pool: allocating a number of padded physical blocks (p 1 ) to n 1 until n 1 +p 1 is a multiple of the maximum supported replication level of the storage pool, and writing the first block to the storage pool by filling in the n 1 physical blocks; and if n 1 is a multiple of the maximum supported replication level of the storage pool, writing the first block to the storage pool by filling in n 1 physical blocks.