Patent ID: 8380926

Claim:
A method for use in handling sector edges, the method comprising: handling input/output (I/O) requests to a storage device, wherein the I/O requests use a different sector size format than that of the storage device; receiving an I/O request for a write operation at a logical address of a virtual device, the write operation specifying new data to be written to the virtual device; determining that the I/O request for the write operation is not aligned to an optimum block size; determining a logical sector associated with the logical address; mapping the logical sector to one or more physical sectors of the storage device; performing a pre-read of the determined logical sector and logical sectors in any portion of the one or more physical sectors that will not be updated; checking the consistency of the pre-read data at a RAID level; and issuing a write from the RAID level to a different level combining the pre-read data and new data.