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Abstract

A continuous media file is comprised of stripe sets over disk drives in one or more RAID sets. In a preferred embodiment, the RAID set includes n disk drives. The data storage of each disk drive in the RAID set is partitioned into an integer number m of hyper-volumes, and the parity is stored in one hyper-volume of each of m disk drives in the RAID set. The stripe set includes a series of transfer units of data in respective ones of the disk drives. Each transfer unit includes an integer number j of data blocks, and each hyper-volume includes an integer number k of transfer units. Each stripe set includes (m)(n-1) transfer units of data. The transfer units of the RAID set are allocated for the storage of continuous media data in a right-to-left and then top-to-bottom order in which the transfer units appear in an m row by n column matrix in which the rows of the matrix represent parity groups of hyper-volumes in the disk drives and the columns of the matrix represent storage in the respective disk drives. At most one write access to each parity hyper-volume need be performed during write access to a stripe set. Parity changes for the data being written are accumulated in non-volatile memory, and written to the RAID set after completion of the writing of the data.

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