What is the primary characteristic of RAID 10?

RAID 10, or RAID 1+0, is designed to combine the benefits of both RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping), making its primary characteristic the combination of speed and redundancy. In RAID 10, data is split into blocks and striped across multiple drives, which enhances performance, as read and write operations can occur on multiple disks simultaneously. Meanwhile, due to the mirroring aspect, each piece of data is duplicated on another drive, providing fault tolerance. This means that in the event of a drive failure, the data is still accessible from the mirrored copy, ensuring data integrity and availability. Thus, the combination of these features—speed from striping and redundancy from mirroring—is what defines RAID 10’s primary characteristic.

The other options do not capture this essential aspect. While it is true that RAID 10 requires a minimum of four drives for effective implementation and does involve mirroring, the focus on speed along with redundancy is what sets it apart, making the third choice the most accurate representation of RAID 10's capabilities.