A method, system, and program manages updates of user data and parity data stored in stripes across a plurality of disk storage units arranged in a data organization type such as a RAID array. In one embodiment, a record of stripes potentially containing inconsistent user and parity data is stored on a disk storage unit. In another aspect, before writing a record of stripes to a disk storage unit, stripe entries for a plurality of write processes is permitted to accumulate. In another aspect, a record of stripes may be written to different disk storage units and a generation number is used to identify the latest record of stripes.