One or more control circuits of a storage system are configured to consolidate the sensing of pre-pad and/or post-pad data for one unaligned write command with the transferring of previously sensed pre-pad and/or post-pad data for another unaligned write command. By consolidating the sensing and transferring, considerable time is saved when programming data for a set of two or more unaligned write commands. Also, in one aspect, a single programming operation is performed for multiple unaligned write commands. Some conventional solutions may need to perform a programming operation for each unaligned write command. Hence, considerable programming time is saved by the storage system. Moreover, write amplification may be reduced by the storage system.