Patent ID: 7822921

Claim:
A parity protection system, comprising: a zeroing module configured to initiate a zeroing process on a plurality of storage devices in the parity protection system by issuing a zeroing command, wherein the parity protection system comprises a processor and a memory; a storage module coupled to the zeroing module configured to execute the zeroing command to cause free physical data blocks identified by the command to assume a zero value; and in response to the free physical data blocks assuming zero values, a controller module to update a parity for one or more stripes in the parity protection system that contain data blocks zeroed by the zeroing command; wherein the storage module in response to an access request from a client, comprising a write operation and associated data, is configured to access the free physical data blocks and to write the data thereto and compute a new parity for one or more stripes associated with the write operation without reading the zeroed physical data blocks to which the data are written.