What benefit does RAID 10 provide compared to other RAID levels?

RAID 10, which combines striping and mirroring, offers both improved performance and redundancy, making it a preferred choice in many scenarios. The striping across multiple drives enhances read and write speeds, as data can be accessed simultaneously from several disks. This significant boost in performance is particularly advantageous for applications that require high throughput.

In addition to performance, RAID 10 mirrors the data across pairs of drives, which provides a strong level of redundancy. This means that if one drive fails, the data on that drive can still be accessed from the mirrored counterpart, ensuring continued operation without data loss. Therefore, RAID 10 is highly effective in environments where both speed and data integrity are critical.

While it is true that RAID 10 does not offer the highest storage capacity—largely due to the mirroring aspect—it compensates for this limitation with its performance and fault tolerance advantages. The cost of data recovery can also be higher because RAID 10 may involve more drives than other configurations, depending on the setup. Configuration complexity is also a factor; while RAID 10 is more complex than some simpler RAID levels, it is not necessarily the simplest configuration available.

In summary, the unique combination of enhanced performance and robust redundancy is what sets RAID 10 apart