RAID 10 Explained: Combining Mirroring and Striping for Performance and Redundancy

RAID 10 is a storage technology that combines mirroring (RAID 1) and striping (RAID 0) to provide both high performance and strong data redundancy. It requires a minimum of four disks, where data is first mirrored in pairs for redundancy and then striped across those mirrored pairs for speed.

Key points about RAID 10:

• Mirroring (RAID 1) duplicates data on two disks, so if one disk fails, the other still has the data intact, ensuring fault tolerance.
• Striping (RAID 0) splits data across multiple disks, allowing simultaneous read/write operations, which significantly improves performance.
• In RAID 10, these two techniques are combined: data is mirrored in pairs, and these pairs are striped, allowing for fast data access and protection against disk failure.

Fault tolerance: RAID 10 can tolerate the failure of one disk in each mirrored pair without data loss. Even two disks can fail as long as they are not from the same mirrored pair, making it highly reliable for critical data.

Performance: Because data is striped across mirrored pairs, RAID 10 offers excellent read and write speeds. It also uses minimal system resources since it avoids complex parity calculations required by other RAID levels like RAID 5 or RAID 6.

Use cases: RAID 10 is ideal for environments requiring both high availability and speed, such as databases, email servers, and transactional systems.

In summary, RAID 10 is a robust RAID configuration that delivers both the redundancy of mirroring and the speed of striping, making it suitable for mission-critical applications where data safety and performance are paramount.