An apparatus for operating a storage system is provided. The apparatus is coupled with one or more storage devices and one or more controllers and comprises a data request input module configured to receive a request for data and determine a data stripe that includes the requested data. The apparatus further comprises a controller instruction module configured to instruct one or more controllers to perform a decoding of code words of the determined data stripe, wherein the code words are acquired by the controllers from the one or more storage devices, and determine, based on error status information associated with the decoding, an error handling operation on the data stripe to modify one or more code words of the data stripe. The apparatus also comprises a data packaging module configured to generate the requested data based on the modified at least one or more code words.