Method for using CRC as metadata to protect against drive anomaly errors in a storage array

The present invention is directed to a method and system for disk drive data recovery utilizing CRC information and RAID parity. CRC meta data is compared with either the CRC generated from the data read from the disk drive or the CRC generated from the data reconstructed from the parity drive. If the CRC metadata matches the CRC generated from the data read from the disk drive, the data from the disk drive is accepted as valid. Otherwise, another comparison is made between the CRC generated from data reconstructed from RAID parity and the CRC metadata. If there is a match, the reconstructed data is used as the valid data; otherwise, the data read from the disk drive is used as valid data.