An n-way parity protection technique enables recovery of up to n storage device (e.g., disk) failures in a parity group of a storage array encoded to protect against n-way disk failures. The storage array is created by first configuring the array with m data disks, where m=p−1 and p is a prime number and a row parity disk. n−1 diagonal parity disks are then added to the array. Each diagonal parity set (i.e., diagonal) is associated with a slope that defines the data and row parity blocks of the array that are included in the diagonal. All diagonals having a common slope within a parity group are organized as a diagonal parity class. For each diagonal parity class, a diagonal parity storage disk is provided to store the diagonal parity.