US Patent 7526606 High-speed redundant disk controller methods and systems

Various apparatus and methods for controlling data for a redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks (RAID) are presented. For example, in one illustrative embodiment, a controlling apparatus can include a translation device capable of reading data from a plurality of N disks, wherein the data of the N disks has a format consisting of a sequence of block stripes with each block containing one or more sector stripes, and wherein each sector stripe is formatted such that N−1 of the sectors contain contiguous target data and the remaining sector contains parity data for the other N−1 target data sectors.