Patent ID: 8065590

Claim:
A method comprising: determining whether any drive of a redundant RAID disk array has failed; identifying a first drive of the redundant RAID disk array that contains an initial sector of a read request data; reading data from the first drive, from the initial sector of the read request up to an end of a block, or to an end of the read request, whichever comes first; and if the initial sector is stored on a failed drive, reading a corresponding range of sectors from remaining drives of the redundant RAID disk array, computing a boolean XOR function of data read from the remaining drives, and transferring a result “on-the-fly”; wherein data is synchronously read from the redundant RAID disk drive array having any number of drives with a single redundant drive, where stored data is striped over the drives with a stripe width of one or more sectors, and a read request size is an integer number of sectors from one up to a capacity of the redundant RAID disk array; wherein each of the sectors includes more than two bytes and a minimum transfer length for the synchronously read data is one sector per drive.