RAID 10, also known as RAID 1+0, is a type of RAID configuration that combines disk mirroring and disk striping to protect data and improve performance. It requires a minimum of four disks and stripes data across mirrored "virtual" drives. RAID 10 is a combination of RAID levels 1 (mirroring) and 0 (striping) . Whenever data is written to the server, it is written across several disks at the same time, which makes it faster than RAID 1. RAID 10 provides full redundancy, meaning that data is fully redundant in a RAID 10 environment. It is a good option for I/O-intensive applications such as email, web servers, databases, and operations that require high disk performance. RAID 10 is also secure because mirroring duplicates all data.

To implement RAID 10, you need at least four physical hard drives and a RAID-compatible disk controller. RAID 10 can be deployed using hardware or software. Hardware RAID requires a RAID controller inside a motherboard slot that connects the drives, while software RAID uses a utility application to manage the RAID configuration.

Advantages of RAID 10 include the following:

• Cost-effective: RAID 10 is an economical and technically simple approach to data protection paired with a boost in performance.
• Full redundancy: Data is fully redundant in a RAID 10 environment.
• Fast recovery: Because it does not rely on parity to rebuild any data elements lost during a drive failure, RAID 10 can recover data faster than other RAID levels.

The high performance of RAID 10, and its ability to speed up both write and read activities, makes it suited to frequently used, mission-critical database servers. However, the four-disk minimum requirement makes RAID 10 a costly choice for smaller computing environments. RAID 10 is most often compared to RAID 5, as the two are the most commonly used configurations. The biggest difference between them is in the way data is rebuilt. Both RAID 5 and RAID 10 have a maximum fault tolerance of just one disk and a total capacity of 8 TB. RAID 5 is slower, but more efficient, and cheaper than RAID 10, as it uses distributed parity.