Which RAID level provides the best redundancy with a minimum of four drives?

RAID 10, often referred to as RAID 1+0, actually offers the best redundancy and performance by combining the features of both RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping). To achieve RAID 10, you need a minimum of four drives, which allows you to create two mirrored pairs that are then striped together. This configuration ensures that even if one drive in each mirrored pair fails, the data remains accessible, thereby providing high availability and redundancy.

While RAID 5 does provide redundancy through parity and only requires a minimum of three drives, it does not offer the same level of redundancy as RAID 10. In RAID 5, the loss of one drive does not affect the data integrity, but if another drive fails before the lost data is rebuilt, data loss can occur. RAID 10, on the other hand, allows for multiple drive failures as long as they don’t occur in the same mirrored pair.

Overall, RAID 10 is highly valued in enterprise environments where both performance and data protection are critical.