A distributed network of storage elements (DNSE) is provided in which the physical capacity of each drive is split into a set of equal sized logical splits which are individually protected within the DNSE using separate RAID groups. To reduce restoration latency, members of the RAID groups having a member in common on a given drive are spread within the DNSE to minimize the number of sets of drives within the DNSE that have RAID members in common. By causing the splits to be protected by RAID groups, restoration of the splits may occur in parallel involving multiple drives within the DNSE. By minimizing the overlap between RAID members on various drives, failure of a given drive will not require multiple reads from another drive in the DNSE. Likewise, spare splits are distributed to enable write recovery to be performed in parallel on multiple drives within the DNSE.