According to further instances, a storage system having write once optical disks may logically separate the high failure rate regions on each optical disk into separate logical tracks using the “reserve track” capability of an optical disk drive. These blocks may thereby be mapped to a continuous set of logical blocks to form the high failure rate stripe or stripes, e.g., as would be appreciated by one skilled in the art after reading the present description. For write once optical discs, which cannot be written in an arbitrary sequence, each of the regions are pre-allocated as reserved tracks. This enables each region to be written independently in numerical order sequence despite the optical disks being configured as “write once”.

It should be noted that although various ones of the approaches included herein are described in the context of optical disks and optical data storage systems, any one or more of these approaches may be implemented in the context of other storage units (e.g., data storage media) which implement erasure codes, e.g., as would be appreciated by one skilled in the art after reading the present description. According to an example which is in no way intended to limit the invention, any one or more of the approaches included herein may be implemented on HDDs, SSDs, etc. However, in other approaches, some of the approaches included herein may be performed on optical disks which are merely included in a same storage system as other types of storage units, e.g., such as HDDs, SSDs, etc.

The present invention may be a system, a method, and/or a computer program product at any possible technical detail level of integration. The computer program product may include a computer readable storage medium (or media) having computer readable program instructions thereon for causing a processor to carry out aspects of the present invention.