What Does Redundant Array of Independent Disks 10 Mean?
Redundant array of independent disks 10 (RAID 10) is a combination of multiple mirrored drives (RAID 1) with data stripe (RAID 0) in a single array. The RAID 10 array consists of a minimum of four hard disk drives and creates a striped set from multiple mirrored drives.
RAID 10 is often referred to as RAID 1+0 or RAID level 10.
Techopedia Explains Redundant Array of Independent Disks 10
The fundamental concept of RAID involves merging small capacity, inexpensive disk drives into a single large array of disk drives that provide high performance and fault tolerance capabilities. The performance of the RAID array often exceeds that of a single large expensive drive. The mechanism of RAID 10 involves the striping of data across all mirrored sets. Mirroring, also known as RAID 1, involves writing data into multiple drives, thereby creating an exact mirrored copy. A typical RAID 1 array implements only two drives, although any number of drives may be used. RAID 0 involves striping data across multiple disk drives in succession.
RAID 1+0 or RAID 10 is quite similar to RAID 0+1. Instead of striping data between disk drive sets and then mirroring them, RAID 10 duplicates or mirrors the first two drives in the set. As a result, RAID 10 offers the same performance as that of RAID 0+1 but provides superior data protection.
The advantages of RAID 10 include:
- Improved performance
- Data redundancy
- High read and write rate
- High performance and fault tolerance
Some of the major drawbacks of RAID 10 include:
- Consumes effective disk space.
- The effective data capacity offered is half of the total capacity of all the disk drives in the array because the data is striped across mirrored drives.
- Slightly complicated to set up.
- More expensive than other levels of RAID.
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