| CPC G06F 11/1666 (2013.01) [G06F 11/1658 (2013.01)] | 20 Claims |

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1. A method, comprising:
creating, for a protection group width W, a cluster of W+1 sequentially indexed drives;
creating at least 2*W same-size sequentially indexed cells in each of the sequentially indexed drives;
creating submatrices of W cells;
creating, in a first cell index of each of the submatrices, a protection group in sequentially indexed drives starting with a lowest indexed drive;
in each submatrix, creating W spare cells and (W−1) additional protection groups distributed in cell-index-wise consecutive runs of a spare cell followed by sequentially ordered members of the additional protection groups; and
widely distributing spare capacity by adding drives to the cluster, creating spare cells, splitting the cluster into first and second clusters, and distributing the spare cells across W drives in each of the first and second clusters.
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