A system and method for distributed erasure coding. A plurality of storage devices is directly connected to one or more host computers, without an intervening central controller distributing data to the storage devices and providing data protection. Parity codes are stored in one or more dedicated storage devices or distributed over a plurality of the storage devices. When a storage device receives a write command, it calculates a partial parity code, and, if the parity code for the data being written is on another storage device, sends the partial parity code to the other storage device, which updates the parity code using the partial parity code.