Question

Explain RAID 10 and its importance?

Answer 1

RAID 10 :Is a Redundant array of independent disks 10, it 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 striped set from multiple mirrored drives.

RAID 10 provides data redundancy and improves performance, best suitable  for I/O-intensive applications -- including email, web servers, databases and operations that require high disk performance -- and organizations that require little to no downtime.

Generally RAID 10 is often called as a combination of RAID 1+0 or RAID level 10.

The idea behind the concept of RAID involving the  merging small capacity, inexpensive ot low cost disk drives into a single large array of disk drives so that it can provide high performance and fault tolerance capabilities of the data .

RAID 1+0/ RAID 10 is different from those of  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.

if we look at the following individuals of RAID 1 & RAID 0:

In RAID 1 configuration provides that only data protection by which copying data from one drive to another. In this case data is fully protected as the mirror copy is available if the originating drive is disabled or unavailable. So it makes a full duplicate of the data, by considering above lines we conclude that RAID 1 requires twice as much storage capacity as required by the original data.

In RAID 0 doesn't provide any data protection; its sole purpose is to enhance drive access performance. It does that by spreading the data out across two or more drives so that multiple read/write heads on the drives can write or access portions of data simultaneously, hence speeding up overall processing.

The high performance of RAID 10, & its ability to speed up both write and read activities.makes it suited to highly used, mission-critical database servers.

Advantages:

1.Quick recovery of data in the event of a disk failure.

2.Very fast reads and writes

3.More fault-tolerant than RAID 5 because RAID 10 can tolerate failures of multiple disks at the same time.

Disadvantages

1.Half of the storage capacity goes to mirroring, so compared to large RAID 5 or RAID 6 arrays, this is an expensive way to have redundancy.

2.It doesn’t provide parity,crc featues.

3.Consumes effective disk space.

4.Slightly complicated to set up.