A method for recording parity data of data stripes within shingled media recording bands in a redundant array of independent disks can be accomplished using a plurality of shingled media recording (SMR) hard disk drives (HDD) each with a plurality of shingled data bands. A data stream received from a host computer system is sequentially stored to a plurality of block segments in successive order, one stripe at a time successively. Each of the shingled data bands possess n data blocks (or multiple data blocks that are grouped together as a data unit) that are successively ordered, each corresponding successive data block from all of the SMR HDDs defines a data stripe, accordingly n data blocks in each SMR HDD defines n stripes across the shingled data bands. A transaction group sync triggers a halt to writing the data stream. The rest of the data stripe is written with fill bits. Parity data is written to a parity drive in one or more SMR parity blocks that correspond in size and sequence to the data blocks in the data stripes possessing the first data stream and any of the fill bits.