Patent ID: 8880840

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining, compressed data in a plurality of strides of a redundant array of independent disks, wherein a stride is configurable to store a plurality of tracks, wherein the stride is a unit of storage in the redundant array of independent disks, and wherein a track represents one of a series of concentric rings on a disk on which the compressed data is stored; receiving, a request to write one or more tracks; and writing the one or more tracks to a selected stride of the plurality of strides, subsequent to comparing the number of operations required to destage selected tracks from the selected stride to the number of operations required to defragment the compressed data in the selected stride, and wherein contiguous free space is created on the selected stride either via destaging of the selected tracks or via defragmentation of the selected stride in response to determining whether the destaging or the defragmentation is faster.