Pros
Improve performance and storage
Data is written identically to two drives
Read request is serviced by either drive
Must have at least two drives but may have others as long as there is an even amount of drives
Array continues to function as long as one drive is still running
Cons
No fault tolerance
Any drive failure destroys the RAID
Not necessarily safe
Systems with “Write caching” turned on has an illusion of higher performance but may not write all data
Power failure can leave the drives in an inconsistent state or even unrecoverable
RAID 10
Data is written in stripes across the primary disks and mirrored on the secondary disks
Consists of four drives typically
Combines the best concepts of RAID 0 and RAID 1
Better performance and reliability
The following RAID drive configurations follow the same concepts as the RAID 10 design.
RAID 2
RAID 3
RAID 4
RAID 5
RAID 6
The disadvantage to this style of configuration is that there is an added
References: Beasley, J. (2009). Networking (2nd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc. Mansfield, K. & Anthonakos, J. (2010). Computer Networking from LANs to WANs: Hardware, Software, and Security. Boston: Course Technology.