Cache is the DRAM based staging area used to provide higher performance to applications for reads and writes. During reads, the RAID controller tries to keep the latest and most often accessed data in the cache and also tries to pre-stage the cache with future data during sequential accesses. For writes, cache is used to provide delayed writes to the drives. This delays the parity calculations and drive writes during RAID 5 operations. More optimization and advanced staging algorithms thus provide better performance.