When assessing RAID configurations, which drive configuration offers both redundancy and increased performance?

RAID 10, also known as RAID 1+0, is an excellent choice for achieving both redundancy and increased performance. This configuration combines the mirroring of RAID 1 with the striping of RAID 0.

In RAID 10, data is initially mirrored across pairs of drives, which ensures that if one drive fails, the data remains accessible from the mirrored drive. This mirroring provides redundancy, safeguarding the data against drive failures. At the same time, because the data is also striped across multiple disks, read and write operations can occur simultaneously across the mirrored pairs. This striping increases performance significantly since data can be read from or written to multiple disks at once.

The benefits of RAID 10 make it particularly valuable for environments requiring high availability and performance, such as databases and virtualized applications, where both quick access to data and reliability are essential.

Other RAID configurations, such as RAID 0, focus solely on performance without redundancy, while RAID 1 offers redundancy but does not utilize striping to enhance throughput. RAID 5 provides some redundancy through parity and improved read performance but can have slower write performance due to parity calculations, making RAID 10 a more robust solution for balancing both requirements effectively.