INTEGRATED SECTOR FORMAT-ERROR CORRECTION CODE SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EFFICIENT WRITING IN A DISK ARRAY SYSTEM

A system and associated method efficiently complete write commands in an ISF disk drive/RAID system with minimal disk accesses to the underlying disk drives. The system updates data in a parity-based disk array system by receiving a write command to write new data. The present system minimizes the number of disk accesses. The present system completes the same or comparable write commands in a total of four accesses to the disk drives. This is realized by combining the read-modify-write operation of updating one or more sectors in an ISF cluster with the read-modify-write operation associated with updating one or more sectors in a parity-based array system, such as a RAID-5 system.