Patent ID: 8527698

Claim:
A parity-based Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) system comprising: a RAID controller comprising: a processor; and a local memory device; a plurality of physical disks (PDs) in communication with the RAID controller; a nonvolatile service memory device in communication with the RAID controller; and wherein at least a portion of the local memory device is allocated for use as a queue for queuing N input/output (IO) commands received from a computer that is external to the RAID system, where N is a positive integer, and wherein the processor generates a lock associated with each received IO command and causes the received IO commands and the locks to be queued in the local memory device, and wherein the processor determines when N IO commands have been queued in the local memory device, and wherein when N IO commands have been queued, the processor causes the N respective locks associated with the N respective queued IO commands to be written to N respective lock storage locations of the service memory device, and wherein after the N respective locks have been written to the nonvolatile service memory device, the processor causes N respective stripes of data and parity bits associated with the N respective IO commands to be written to the PDs.