RAID 10 RAID 5
Key feature Stripe of mirrors: Combines Striping with parity
striping and mirroring for fault
tolerance and performance.
Striping Yes; data is striped (or split)
evenly across groups of disks.
Each group has 2 disks that
are set up as mirror images of
each other. So RAID 10
combines features of RAID 0
and RAID 1.
Mirroring, Yes. Mirroring of data makes
redundancy and the RAID 10 system fault-
fault tolerance tolerant. If one of the drives
fails, data can be quickly
rebuilt by simply copying over
from other disks.
Performance Reads are fast because of
striping. Writes are also fast
because even though each
block of data needs to be
written twice (mirroring), the
writes happen on 2 different
drives so they can occur in
parallel. Parity info doesn't
need to be calculated.
Applications When performance is
important for reads and writes,
and when it's important to
recover from failure quickly.
Minimum 4 3
number of
physical disks
required
Yes; data is striped (or
split) evenly across all
disks in the RAID 5 setup.
In addition to data, parity
information is also stored
(once) so that data can be
recovered if one of the
drives fails.
No mirroring or
redundancy; fault
tolerance is achieved by
calculating and storing
parity information. Can
tolerate the failure of 1
physical disk.
Fast reads because of
striping (data distributed
across many physical
disks). Writes are a little
slower because parity
information needs to be
calculated. But since parity
is distributed, 1 disk
doesn't become a
bottleneck (like it does in
RAID 4).
Good balance of efficient storage,
decent performance, failure
resistance and good security.
RAID 5 is ideal for file
and application servers that have
a limited number of data drives.
 Parity disk? No; parity/checksum are not
calculated in a RAID 10 setup.
Advantages Quick recovery of data in the
event of a disk failure.
Disadvantages Disk utilization is only 50% so
RAID 10 is an expensive way
to obtain storage redundancy
when compared with storing
parity information.
Parity information is
distributed among all
physical disks in the RAID.
If one of the disks fails,
parity info is used to
recover data that was
stored on that drive.
Fast reads; inexpensive
redundancy and fault
tolerance; data can be
accessed (albeit at a
slower rate) even while a
failed drive is in the
process of being rebuilt.
Recovery from failure is
slow because of parity
calculations involved in
restoring data and
rebuilding the replacement
drive. It is possible to read
from the RAID while this is
going on but read
operations during that time
will be quite slow.