Which configuration is typically better for high performance with redundancy?

RAID 10, also known as RAID 1+0, combines the mirroring of RAID 1 and the striping of RAID 0 to achieve both high performance and redundancy. This configuration requires a minimum of four hard drives. In RAID 10, data is first mirrored, creating duplicates of the data for redundancy; then, those mirrors are striped, allowing for increased read/write speeds.

The performance benefits come from the striping, which allows multiple drives to share the load when reading and writing data. This means that the system can access different segments of the data at once, significantly improving I/O performance compared to other RAID configurations. Additionally, because of the mirroring aspect, if one drive fails, its mirrored pair can immediately take over, ensuring data availability without downtime.

In contrast, other RAID levels such as RAID 0 focus solely on performance through striping, but lack redundancy, meaning that if one drive fails, all data is lost. RAID 1 offers redundancy through mirroring, but does not provide the same level of performance as RAID 10 because it does not take advantage of data striping. RAID 5 provides a decent balance of performance and redundancy, utilizing parity for fault tolerance, but its write operations can be slower