Patent ID: 7788526

Claim:
A redundant array of independent disks (RAID) storage system comprising: an array of hard disk devices (HDDs) organized in a two-dimensional structure of rows and columns of HDDs; a full stride logically partitioning the rows and columns of HDDs into rows and columns of elements, the full stride including an element from each HDD in the rows and columns of HDDs, each element in the full stride residing on a physically independent HDD; each element having an element type, wherein a first element type is a data element and a second element type is a checksum element; a row checksum element calculated as a checksum of all data elements in a row of the full stride; a column checksum element calculated as a checksum of all data elements in a column of the full stride; wherein the row checksum element calculation and the column checksum element calculation intersect at a single data element, the row checksum element and the column checksum element updated as part of a write operation updating the data element; additional full strides, wherein each element position in each full stride relative to the array of HDDs is rotated to a different position between successive full strides relative to the array of HDDs; and a device adapter for controlling access to the array of HDDs, the device adapter calculating the row checksum element and the column checksum element, the row checksum element and the column checksum element utilized to correct one or more failures in the array of HDDs.