A system and method improve the performance of non-volatile memory storage by rebuilding, on the fly, “lost data” in response to a read request, which identifies data to be read or recovered, by identifying a parity data storage device in a set of data storage devices that contains parity corresponding to the identified data; sending a reconstruction request to a respective data storage device, which may be the parity data storage device or other data storage device in the system, to reconstruct the identified data, and receiving the identified data from the respective data storage device. The reconstruction request commands the respective data storage device to retrieve, via peer-to-peer read requests, from other data storage devices, data from one or more data blocks, and to reconstruct the identified data based on the retrieved data and parity data locally stored at the parity data storage device.