According to another illustrative approach, which again is in no way intended to limit the invention, the erasure code stripes may be multi-dimensional. Thus, the process of organizing the selected strips in a desired manner may include dividing the strips into “M” sequentially numbered sets of strips, where M is the number of devices on one dimension of a given erasure code group, e.g., as would be appreciated by one skilled in the art after reading the present description. Moreover, by dividing the strips into M sequentially numbered sets of strips, the strips in the given erasure code stripe may each be selected from different sets. According to an example, which is in no way intended to limit the invention, the optical disks in an erasure code group of “M” units may be selected across the dimensions of the erasure code, such that the storage unit index “j” is applied to “K” multiple strips. Moreover, the resulting stripe may be protected against at least one set of strips with index “j”, where j ranges from 0 to N/K.

With continued reference to FIG. 5, operation 506 includes mapping the organized selected strips to form the given erasure code stripe. With respect to the present description, it should be noted that the process of “mapping” strips involves mapping address blocks to virtual blocks. In other words, operation 506 involves forming a logical-to-physical relationship between the address blocks of the strips and the intended virtual blocks.