Chapter 5: Concepts
RAID 10 – Mirror / Stripe
Mirror/Stripe combines both of the RAID 0 and RAID 1 logical drive types. It can increase performance by reading and writing data in parallel while protecting data with duplication. At least four disk drives are needed for RAID 10 to be installed. With a
Data Stripe
Data
Mirror
Disk Drives
Figure 4. RAID 10 takes a data mirror on one drive pair and stripes it over two drive pairs
The data capacity is similar to a RAID 1 logical drive, with half of the total storage capacity dedicated for redundancy. An added plus for using RAID 10 is that, in many situations, such a logical drive offers double fault tolerance. Double fault tolerance may allow your logical drive to continue to operate depending on which two disk drives fail.
RAID 10 logical drives on the FastTrak SX Series consist of 4 disk drives.
About Dual Data Redundancy
One unique (though rarely occurring) feature of RAID 10 is dual fault tolerance. In some cases, two drives can fail simultaneously and still maintain the integrity of data. There are six combinations in which two drives can fail. The FastTrak SX4300 or SX8300 card protects your data array in four of those cases. Assume the drives are configured as follows:
•CH indicates channels on the FastTrak Controller card.
39