Patent ID: 7134066

Claim:
A storage system, comprising a plurality of storage devices arranged in an array having M rows and N columns, M being greater than or equal to three and N being greater than or equal to three, the array having a Hamming distance of d when P of the storage devices are configured as parity storage devices and (M×N)−P of the storage devices are configured as data storage devices, the array having a Hamming distance of d+1 when P+1 of the storage devices are configured as parity storage devices and (M×N)−(P+1) of the storage devices are configured as data storage devices, the array being configured with P+1 of the storage devices as parity storage devices and (M×N)−(P+1) of the storage devices as data storage devices, and information contained in the parity storage devices being determined based on a system parity and the linear equations based on the N rows being based on a generalized parity code.