A system and method for managing a time-limited long-running process that acts upon disks of a disk array is based upon a general rule of acting upon each disk in an order based upon the length of time from when it was last acted-upon. Disks having the greatest last acted-upon time value (e.g. were processed the longest-time ago) are queued first by the process for acting-upon in the present run. The greatest last acted-upon time includes disks that have no prior last acted-upon time (e.g. newly added/mounted disks). A registry key entry is maintained in a registry file for each of the RAID groups that includes the volume's file system identifier (FSID) and particular RAID group identifier (RGID). The RGID includes the last acted-upon time for the RAID group. This is set to a positive time number if the process has last acted-upon the group to completion. Alternatively, the last acted-upon time value is set to zero if the volume has not previously been acted-upon to completion or the RAID group is newly mounted.