Patent ID: 8015440

Claim:
An apparatus for reliable, high performance storage of data, the apparatus comprising: a striping module that calculates a stripe pattern for data to be stored and writes N data segments of a stripe to N storage devices within a set of storage devices, wherein each of the N data segments is written to a separate storage device; a parity-mirror module that writes the N data segments of the stripe to a parity-mirror storage device within the set of storage devices, the parity-mirror storage device being in addition to the N storage devices; a parity progression module that calculates one or more parity data segments for the stripe and stores the one or more parity data segments for the stripe on the parity-mirror storage device, and wherein one or more of the striping module, the parity-minor module, and the parity progression module comprise one or more of logic hardware and executable code stored on one or more computer readable storage media and executed by a processor.