A RAID system is provided in which the RAID controller of the system causes a predetermined number, N, of IO commands to be queued in a memory element, where N is a positive integer. After the N IO commands have been queued, the RAID controller writes N locks associated with the N IO commands in parallel to a service memory device. The RAID controller then writes N stripes of data and parity bits associated with the N IO commands to the PDs of the system to perform striping and parity distribution. If a catastrophic event, such as a power failure, occurs, the RAID controller reads the locks from the service memory device and causes parity to be reconstructed for the stripes associated with the locks. These features improve write performance while preventing the occurrence of data corruption caused by write holes.