Disclosed is a data storage architecture that provides data regeneration
following the failure of two storage domains and that provides conversion
for RAID-6 to RAID-5 or RAID-0 without moving or copying any data. A
storage grid comprising at least eight domains and twelve rows contains
user data in a first contiguous portion and may contain row parity data
in a second continuous portion and may contain vertical parity data in a
third contiguous portion. In one embodiment data is arranged in row and
vertical sets each comprising four data blocks such that each user data
block is a member of one row set and is a member of one vertical set. In
another embodiment sets comprise two blocks each.